WebProNews » Wikia

Wikia Search Takes Leave Of Abscence

Navneet Kaushal — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:50:56 +0000

Jimmy Wales announced a few days ago, the closure of Wikia Search due to the ongoing economic recession. Wikia Search was designed with the primary purpose to allow users determine the rankings of sites and pages for all other users.

Wales summed up the decision like this,

“In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.”

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Wikia CEO Talks Wikianswers Conflict

Chris Crum — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:56:54 +0000

Wikia has just relaunched an answers site called Wikianswers, which has drawn a bit of controversy over its name. There is another site called Wiki Answers, which was once called FAQFarm and is now owned by Answers.com.

Yesterday I spoke with Chris Whitten, the founder of FAQFarm, who said, "It’s perplexing to me that Jimmy [Wales - Wikia President] and Gil [Penchina - Wikia CEO] would choose to relaunch their site as ‘Wikianswers.’Although it’s true that someone had started a Q&A Wikia years ago, that doesn’t mean they have any stronger claim to the name than WikiAnswers. I registered the WikiAnswers.com domain even earlier than that, in June 2004." More of what Whitten said here.

A Wikia representative was kind enough to put me in touch with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. Here’s what he had to say:

FAQFARM was aware we were operating Wikianswers.

Wikia has hosted a Question & Answer wiki called Wikianswers since 2004, and we have revamped and re-launched it because we believe we can provide the best resource for people.

Wikianswers.com (or wiki.answers.com) changed its name from FAQFARM in 2006/07 without getting Wikia’s permission on what’s clearly a conflicting and confusing name and address. FAQFARM was aware we were operating Wikianswers, but decided to go ahead with the name change anyway, perhaps believing as a small company Wikia wouldn’t contest it. Perhaps as a result, the Patent & Trademark Office did not approve Answers.com’s application for trademark protection of Wikianswers. We cannot speak to the domain name question as that is not something the Patent & Trademark office typically considers.

All that said, we believe Wikia’s Q&A site is better in part because its more in keeping with the wiki spirit. The content is freely licensed (unlike wiki.answers.com) and anyone can contribute (wiki.answers.com requires you to register to change questions as an example). We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than any corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in a way that takes some rights away from the customer.

Ultimately it is up to users to decide which they like better. Those searching for "answers" might have a better chance of ending up with the Answers.com version. The first result on Google is Answers.com itself, which has a prominent link at the top to its version of Wiki Answers. A search for "wikianswers" also yields a top result of Answers.com’s version (though Wikia’s version is right below it).

UPDATE: Answers Corp. (the company behind the non-Wikia version) CEO Bob Rosenschein has a post up titled "WikiAnswers: setting the record straight," which offers his take on the subject:

We are admirers of Jimmy Wales but must set the record straight about the recent statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”.

Wikia’s Answers category is indeed one of thousands of wikis on its site, right between Ansible and Anthony Trollope. It started in November 2004 and had almost no activity for the past four years. By August 2007, the site had a total of 17 answers. By their launch last week, there were about 1,000. The site remains very small, despite their seeding thousands of unanswered questions last week… Read the post here.

Rumor: Wikia Reduces Head Count By 30 Percent

Doug Caverly — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:26:38 +0000

Wikia may not be doing so well. Many other companies are following the same path, of course, but a new rumor has it that some layoffs have occurred and 30 percent of Wikia’s workforce is now eligible for unemployment benefits.

In the 43-person company, that translates to about 13 individuals. As for the rationale behind the move, there’s always the possibility that this is more of a precautionary measure than a response to current problems, but another reason reached the ears of Valleywag.

Owen Thomas writes, "A source who has seen Wikia’s numbers says the company is experiencing ‘a hemorrhaging of cash circa 1999′ – losses, in other words, like the first generation of dotcoms. No surprise there, since it has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Poland, and many of its products, like Wikia Search, are staggeringly unpopular."

What no one seems to know, though, (aside from whether the layoffs definitely occurred) is who was affected. A little bit about Wikia’s current strategy could be learned depending on whether marketers or engineers got the ax, for example. Even more clues might be tied to which office was most heavily hit.

We’ll keep our ears open, and on a slight side note, recommend that former Wikia employees send their resumes to Trulia.

Wikipedia Defers To Google

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:26:53 +0000

UPDATE 4/9/08: Seems there was some confusion sparked by this piece, which is, at best, a muddled, meandering, word-labyrinth posing as an unconventional, smart-alecky essay on web journalism/blogging. That’s okay, any reader would find himself in good company lost amid my verbose effluvia. For crying out loud, I used a word like "bildungsroman" and made references not just to Roman mythology but also to an obscure Persian king 3,500 years dead. I take full responsibility for that and for trying to force readers to read between the lines to understand this piece wasn’t really about Wikipedia or Powerset. I had an opportunity to illustrate a point rather than just come out and say it, and I took it, and if more than one person doesn’t get it then I failed at illustrating it effectively. C’est la vie. I’ll try to refrain from being too artistic with my points in the future.

So, let’s make the point clear: Online journalists (and increasingly traditional journalists) and bloggers, such as the one described in a New York Times piece whose ambition leads them to insomnia and cardiac arrest, are under enormous pressure to not just be first with a story, but also to evaluate and analyze first, and to do both things more often. This trend makes it more difficult for writers to do their job effectively and responsibly. They have less time to fact check, more time speculate, and incentive to get that speculation out there, which only serves to cloud the truth, which is the ultimate goal of journalism.

It’s also hard on the PR industry because suddenly there are all these new sources and writers to work with, and the Internet just increases the number of possible requests for comment that come in, and all of them can’t possibly be answered. They have to judge who is most important to answer. Luckily, Wikipedia thought I was one of those important people to answer and I was able to dig up the truth of the matter, which is presented before going on to what I thought would illustrate the point via what I thought was quite obviously a fun bit of "faction" (fact + fiction), the point being that the truth is often much different than what can be imagined (but you probably already knew that). Powerset’s Mark Johnson notes also that it is difficult for natural language search engines to separate the two. That doesn’t surprise me. That’s like asking a robot to understand sarcasm and the meaning within voice intonation. Sometimes a human can’t convey that right to another human, much less a machine.

So, below is yesterday’s essay. I’ve reformatted and put the important parts in bold, such as the quote from Brian Vibber, the thesis (which comes awkwardly toward the middle), and the subtle grammatical clues beginning with "just imagine if," which indicate in grammar that what follows is presented in the subjunctive mood, or as we might know it, idle speculation. The speculative part has been put in italics to separate it.

I even added open and close imagination tags.

Perhaps next time, I’ll publish with a disclaimer, an idea that, frankly, kind of saddens me.

Blame information overload. If you did a search on Wikipedia today, you might have been greeted with this message: "Wikipedia search is disabled for performance reasons. You can search via Google or Yahoo! in the meantime."

That got me all excited about the possibilities (cuz search is in my "beat") and immediately sent me into a fit of speculation via keyboard. I asked questions nobody answered; I took screenshots; I relayed a humorous egg-head anecdote, a sort of flash-literary bildungsroman about how I discovered it, and by the time I had finished, well, my question was answered, so let’s save some time and get it out of the way, in a more blogger fashion:

Wikipedia took down its search engine today for maintenance and let Google and Yahoo conduct searches for them instead. Wikipedia search sucked before. Now it might be better because searchers can choose between MediaWiki, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live, Wikiwix, and Exalead. You may have been able to do this before. I don’t remember because I tried to search there once or twice and said never again. This time, though, Wikipedia was pretty good at bringing back relevant results for my favorite imposter king, Smerdis, also known as Gaumata.

Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brian Vibber said, "Search was temporarily disabled as a load-reducing measure during the investigation of an unrelated problem (a change to log page lookups which used bad indexing, bogging down the database servers). It was reenabled a few hours later, once the unrelated problem had been fixed."

Hmmph. A lot can change over lunch.

A few things remain true, though. Powerset and Wikia Search are still out there somewhere under wraps and ambitious rhetoric, and Wales & Co., after all that jazz about Wikia Search, made Wikipedia search better by deferring to the experts. Props for making it better, though. I love Wikipedia.

But it also kind of illustrates the problems with this century’s great media transformation as writers and bloggers are expected more and more to sacrifice thoroughness for speed. (Which seems more important now that we know bloggers are killing themselves trying to be first )

Too bad, though. Just imagine all the speculative buzz that could have been generated if I had published this:

I stumbled across it by typical stream-of-web-consciousness accident, in case you really think I have time to test every prominent site’s search functionality. Previously, during my morning research routine, a story out of India about a baby born with two faces had caught my attention. A colleague joked:

"One could name the child Janeus I suppose."

I told my colleague that was likely very funny in a sad, dark humor kind of way, but I was too pathetically educated to get it. This must be what talking to Dennis Miller is like.

He sent me a link to Wikipedia, which, in his instant-messaging haste was absent a URL parameter. This led me to the Wikipedia search page (and later to the conclusion that, yes, naming it Janeus would be darkly, horrifyingly hilarious and awful—this is the same guy who introduced me to Goatse, after all). I tested it with another query, this time from my own library of obscure references, for King Smerdis, and sure enough got the same message.

I’m not going to pretend that it was a secret Wikipedia’s search engine was severely lacking. I learned a long time ago it was faster and more relevant to run a site-specific search on Google. So it made perfect sense that they would upgrade it eventually (and hopefully).

But I also remember those grandiose predictions made by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how his search project Wikia Search would bust Google’s block. The mind goes wild with possibilities:

1. Wikia Search is about to launch after just one year in development and they’re going to show it off by integrating it into one of the biggest sites on the Web. Smart move!

2. But they defaulted to Google (and Yahoo, we presume to avoid the appearance of favoritism—it’s okay, we get it) during the interim, which could mean all that bloviating came to naught along with an admission that search ain’t as easy as one might think it is.

3. Powerset also has talked a big game about the future of search and the company’s semantic approach, even if launch seems repeatedly delayed. We were supposed to hear from them in March, which came and went without much Powerset fanfare. Back in September, when Powerset was still teasing everybody, the Powerset blog mentions Wikipedia for explanatory purposes, but rumors circulating in January also spoke of a grand collaboration between the two.

Wow. All that from a two-faced baby.

Which is it? Well, Wikimedia nor Powerset got back with me in time for publication, so we’ll go on wondering for a while.

Blogosphere Being Hard on Wikia Search

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:10:09 +0000

I’m generally in favour of bashing those who need to be bashed, and I definitely like taking the wind out of the Web 2.0 windbags (you know who you are), but I think the blogosphere is being a little hard on Wikia Search. Mike Arrington says that it’s a letdown, Allen Stern at Centernetworks
says it’s “not ready yet,” and Stan Schroeder of Frantic Industries comes right out and says that it sucks.

About the only person who’s being magnanimous (and can afford to be) is Google blogger Matt Cutts, who welcomes Wikia to the search business, although MG Siegler at ParisLemon says it actually looks pretty decent for something that’s in alpha. I’m inclined to give Jimmy Wales the benefit of the doubt on this one, but not because I’m one of those Wales sycophants that the always curmudgeonly Seth Finkelstein mentions.

As usual, something approaching what I think is a fair viewpoint emerges from the comments section of a blog — in this case, TechCrunch. Mike says that Wikia is disappointing, and in the comments Jimmy says that he warned everyone not to have high expectations about what it would look like, and notes that Wikipedia looked pretty rough in the early days too. That’s the problem with social anything — you can’t just pop out of the cake on day one with a built-in thriving community.

Is it just a bunch of links cobbled together by Nutch and Grub (names that sound like a couple of animated characters from a new Disney blockbuster)? Yes. It’s in alpha, for pete’s sake. For my part, I think I’m going to try and forget about Wikia Search for at least six months and then take a look around and see what’s there. If it’s still a ghost town, then maybe there will be something to get concerned about.

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Wikia Search Has A Lot To Prove

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 16:17:24 +0000

Nobody’s sure what to expect from Wikia Search, perhaps even its founder. Even for just an alpha launch, the search critics are generally unimpressed, making one wonder just how long Jimmy Wales will have to prove his concept.

His words in The New York Times are decidedly less fiery and cloud-headed than they were a year ago. Back then Wales said search was broken, perhaps to the surprise of many Google-approving information seekers, and Wikia would fix it.

This morning, though, Wales warns people not to expect a Google killer just yet, at least not at this stage. But he predicts that Wikia will eventually be a "Google-quality search engine."

If that’s the reimagined goal of Wikia a year later, then perhaps search wasn’t as broken as initially thought, just lacking in comparable quality.

But we kind of knew that already.

Nobody’s been able to knock off Google, not even companies with the biggest budgets and the best (well, the not-working-at-Google best) the current class of search engineers colleges have to offer. All of them are working on at least matching Google too.

Even if they did, perhaps an even bigger challenge would be to steal mindshare, as Google has become synonymous with search. The idea that Google is the best in the business is already quite entrenched in much of the world’s psyche.

But Jimmy’s concept is very different. It may involve robots, but it doesn’t rely on robots. It relies on humans deciding what the most appropriate results are instead of increasingly sophisticated bots guessing at what humans want.

Wikipedia’s taken its share of flack over the years, especially from academic institutions and traditionally-structured encyclopedias. Wales pulled that project through and made it a household resource. So at least his track record is good.

However, just as everybody with a stake in the information presented at Wikipedia is prone to manipulate it where they can, Wikia Search faces the same type of inherent flaws. It’s an open source project, and the algorithm isn’t a carefully guarded secret to prevent gaming.

Matt Cutts has already been tinkering around there, and Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal predicts that SEOs will eventually kill it (assuming Wikia gains some critical mass, or at least impresses more than it has so far.

"If Wikia achieves any measurable market share, it’s going to face a direct onslaught–something that might be hard to battle, when you have such an open-door policy," said Beal.

Search Wikia Debuts To Mild Reviews

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:03:57 +0000

The ambitious project by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, dubbed a Google challenger in search, elicited a tepid response from reviewers.

Wikipedia took time to ramp up to its position today, and its looks like Search Wikia will need a while to get to the same place. If the launch of Search Wikia was meant to hit the ground running, we would guess it has a bad case of plantar fascitis.

That link to the painful foot condition returns a first page of search results from Search Wikia’s available resources. Some topics may have a “mini article” created about them, which would appear atop the results, but plantar fascitis doesn’t have one yet.

Of its first ten search results, only the fifth one links to a credible resource, eMedicine at WebMD. All of the other nine links go to sites of various commercial interests.

Search Wikia’s results will eventually allow people to rate the links. Doing a mouseover of a link present a group of five stars, which one can click to provide a rating. But doing that at this time returns a message, ‘Sorry, these don’t actually do anything yet ‘.

As an alpha product, Wales and company likely do not expect a lot of great comments about Search Wikia yet. Allen Stern has been using it for several months and said it has “a long way to go in terms of interface, usability and features to get me to want to change (or add) it to the search engines.”

Michael Arrington was much less circumspect. “It may be one of the biggest disappointments I

Wikia Schmikia: Try Out These Sites

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:39:10 +0000

Jimmy Wales and Wikia Search may be getting all the press this week, but there are resources out there you may not know.

The Wikipedia phenomenon has garnered global attention, with its community of contributors and editing policies for its encyclopedia of information. Much of the attention has lavished praise on the site, but detractors claim its flaws harm the site’s users.

Trust comes into play when it concerns information. While Wales has become a minor celebrity as Wikipedia grew, he’s no master librarian, and probably very few of the site’s contributors hold such credentials either.

This likely motivated Gary Price at Resource Shelf when he commented on the Wikia Search hubbub:

It

2008 Could Be a Bad year for Content Quality

Aaron Wall — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:52:51 +0000

The web levels the playing field, allowing individuals to compete with larger corporations, largely through the smaller players making dirt public and launching viral marketing campaigns around issues. Because there is a publisher publishing every opinion and angle, it is easy to discount just about everything, especially attempts for new market participants to become remarkable.
Gawker announced they are shifting their business model from quanity to quality:

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there’s now a surfeit. And what’s in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find.

With them determining quality based on the ability to garner links and pageviews, do you think that is going to improve content quality, or just cause more mud slinging and noise? The easy way to get more page views is controversy, as pointed out by Scott Karp and Scoble.

2008 will probably be a nasty year for online content quality, as the true flaws of PageRank and the selfish nature of bloggers with new found power shine brighter than ever, feeding off one another. Blogs that once acted as hubs spotting good ideas and sending visitors to them will now take your best ideas, reformat them, add a bit of original content, drop the attribution, and get the pageviews they need to get paid. Where they once linked at your new content look for them to link back to their recent greatest hits from 2 days ago. Every post builds off the last. Every blogger for themself.

Google has Knol. Wikipedia has Wikia search. Yahoo has answers. Mahalo has how tos. Topical channels that highlighted content will get greedier with links. Virtually every clean traffic source is trying to become the end destination too.

People will eventually get sick of controversy and traffic hoarding the same way we became banner blind. Anyone just getting started out might be able to make some moves into the market with controversial content, but for those who are already established the key to future growth will be going back over your old ideas, refining them, making them more accessible, and producing them in better formats. 10 pieces of anchor content will pull a site further along than 1,000 me too posts. And linking out will still help too, assuming you pay your content writers based on something other than pageviews.

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Wikia’s ArmchairGM

Mathew Ingram — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:41:40 +0000

I was watching the interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Om Malik’s show on Revision3, because I’m always interested in what Jimmy is up to, and he mentioned a site called ArmchairGM, which I don’t recall hearing about before — or at least paying much attention to.

Om was talking about how he wanted a combination of his blog and a wiki, so that his community could contribute and get involved more, and Jimmy said he saw ArmchairGM as being close to that kind of thing.

ArmchairGM.com is a sports site that Wikia (the for-profit company that Wales runs) bought earlier this year for $2-million. It’s designed as a kind of combination blog and community site for sports fans, and so it has a bunch of the same features as a blog — posts, comments, etc. — but also many features of a wiki, in that anything can be edited (apart from user profiles), as well as some features of a Facebook-style social network.

For example, the site allows members to give each other gifts (which have a twist, in that they can be created by members), and to vote on or rate each other’s posts and comments — and it also has an interesting level system that allows members to work their way up based on the amount of activity they put into the site. Registering gets you 1,000 points and recruiting a new member gets you 5,000, and you get points for writing a new post, editing a post, and whether your comments get votes or not.

It’s an interesting idea, and the site appears to have gained a substantial amount of traction and developed a strong community. I don’t know how long a period the numbers relate to, but the site says it has more than 73,000 pages and there have been 441,000 edits, 660,000 votes and 173,000 comments. As of September it had about a million page views a month, according to TechCrunch.

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