Wikia Search

Last updated

Wikia Search
Wikia Search.png
Wikia Search Homepage.png
The Wikia Search homepage in Firefox
Type of site
 Search Engine
Available inEnglish and multiple translations
Owner Wikia Inc.
Created by Jimmy Wales
URL search.wikia.com
CommercialYes
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJanuary 7, 2008;16 years ago (2008-01-07)
Current statusClosed

Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. [1] Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search engine technology and officially launched as a "public alpha" on January 7, 2008. [2] The roll-out version of the search interface was widely criticized by reviewers in mainstream media. [3]

Contents

History

On December 23, 2006, Wales made a passing comment regarding the possibility of a wiki-based internet search. [4] The result was extensive media coverage in multiple languages, in outlets like The Guardian , the Sydney Morning Herald , and online editions of Forbes and Business Week publishing the statement as an announcement, encouraging the company to re-brand and relaunch its previous search engine proposal under the temporary name of "Search Wikia". [5] In a later interview, Wales attempted to clarify several issues. He said that funding received from Amazon.com was not specific to the search project and also restated that Wikia and Wikipedia have separate management, even though they shared three key stakeholders. When asked whether the project was "formally announced", he said it was partly planned and partly a response to news coverage. [6]

On January 31, 2007, at a talk given at New York University, Wales announced that Wikia plans to build a search engine rivaling those of Google and Yahoo based on the kind of collaborative cooperation which has been so successful in developing Wikipedia, arguing that "search should be open, transparent, participatory, and democratic." [7] He later suggested this new approach could account for five percent of the search market. [8] On March 10, 2007, Gil Penchina, chief executive officer of Wikia, stated in an interview that the goal for the project is to get five percent of the search market and that a release date for services was not scheduled. "We're really trying to build a movement to make search free and open and transparent," Penchina said. "We have some servers up and people are hacking away." The free and open-source approach of utilizing programmers and users around the world is different from that used by major search providers such as Google and Yahoo, who keep most of their code secret, and could provide a search engine that lets users edit and fine tune its results. [9]

On December 24, 2007, Wales announced that Wikia Search had entered "private pre-alpha". [10] [11]

On June 3, 2008, an upgraded version of Wikia Search was released with additional features such as improved screen display and facilities for users to rate, edit and enhance the search results. In particular, it offered users the possibility of adding pertinent URLs to the results displayed and deleting any misleading results with immediate effect. [12] The improvements were widely welcomed by a number of former critics. [13]

In August 2008 Wikia Search launched an official version of the Wikia toolbar that can be downloaded and added on to the Firefox browser. In October 2008, WISE – Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions [14] was released.

By August 2008, Wikia Search held a 0.000079% share of the search market in the U.S., compared with Google's 70.77%. [15] While Google was conducting experiments with page ranking based on user feedback around this time, Jimmy Wales stated that Google's random tests and its closed algorithm were different from the open, community-oriented crowdsourcing attempts of Wikia Search. [16] In March 2009, the project ended: "... Wikia Search was not making its numbers. With only 10,000 unique users a month over the past six months, Wales said, it was hard to justify the resources being put into it." [17]

As of April 16, 2009, the site was running, but with "So long and thanks for all the fish! Have a specific question? Try wikianswers!" near the bottom of the page. Finally on May 14, 2009, the search engine service was brought to a halt. Queries to the Wikia Search website were redirected, with a message in part stating "The Wikia Search project has ended."

Search engine

Features

The search engine's result pages provided access to three major components:

Mini-articles

A prominent feature of the search engine were the human-written mini articles. Mini articles were short articles about the topics given by their title. They were hosted by a Wikia wiki.

Whenever a search query is issued with mini in front, the results page looked in the wiki for a mini article with a name that matched the search query. If no matching article existed, the search user was given the opportunity to write a new one.

Social network

The user interface was tied in with a social network application, called "foowi". [18] Users could create an account for the application and fill in a profile. The system linked the wiki login to the social network login. Profile functions include Status, Basic profile, White board, Albums, Friends, Personal and Work.

Web search engine

The web search engine consisted of the following components:

  • Crawler(s) (Grub),
  • Indices, the search engine proper (three selectable indices, by default an index that uses Nutch)
  • and browser based results presentation (written in [[JavaScript language

The results presentation used XML-formatted requests to query the index. The XML format is called "Open Index [19] and can be used to query indices other than the one at Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). The results presentation once included an option to select a different index to be used (out of three).

In early 2009, Yahoo! BOSS was being used as the back-end. [20]

Organization

The servers that implemented the web search engine's default index [21] were owned and operated by the ISC. [22] Although the index servers were donated to ISC, the index server's domain name still remains the one of the Wikia Search software labs, [23] [24] The search engine's main page [25] and result pages [26] themselves were served by Wikia (note that the result pages' content was retrieved from the index server at swlabs.org, not from wikia.com).

The social network, like the results presentation, was hosted by Wikia.

Search Wikia, [27] the wiki which hosted the mini articles, is hosted by Wikia. The wiki's content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). [28] Although formally owned by Wikia, Wikia's management have stated that they want the wiki's user community to govern the wiki, [29] as is custom with Wikia wikis in general.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Wikipedia</span>

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki</span> Type of website that visitors can edit

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grub (search engine)</span>

Grub was an open source distributed search crawler platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spotlight (Apple)</span> macOS search feature

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Settings. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes. Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality. There are also command-line tools to perform functions such as Spotlight searches.

hCalendar is a microformat standard for displaying a semantic (X)HTML representation of iCalendar-format calendar information about an event, on web pages, using HTML classes and rel attributes.

A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database through semantic queries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jimmy Wales</span> Co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is a British-American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

Wikiseek was a search engine that indexed English Wikipedia pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles. The search engine was funded by a Palo Alto based Internet startup SearchMe and was officially launched on January 17, 2007. Most of the funding came from Sequoia Capital. It used Google ads on its search returns to generate profit. As of 2008 it is no longer active.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apache Solr</span> Open-source enterprise-search platform

Solr is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features and rich document handling. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uncyclopedia</span> Satirical website that parodies Wikipedia

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is best known as the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. However, the foundation also hosts 14 other related content projects. It also supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all.

SearchMe was a visual search engine based in Mountain View, California. It organized search results as snapshots of web pages — an interface similar to that of the iPhone's and iTunes's album selection.

A wiki hosting service, or wiki farm, is a server or an array of servers that offers users tools to simplify the creation and development of individual, independent wikis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fandom (website)</span> Wiki hosting service and domain

Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of Wikipedia</span> Overview of and topical guide to Wikipedia

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VisualEditor</span> Editor for Wikipedia and other MediaWiki websites

VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timeline of web search engines</span>

This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.

References

  1. ↑ "The Book Stops Here". Wired News. March 13, 2005. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  2. ↑ "The "public alpha" of Wikia search project". Archived from the original on May 14, 2008. Retrieved January 10, 2008.
  3. ↑ "Wikipedia founder's search engine gets bad reviews". June 7, 2008. Archived from the original on April 23, 2012. Retrieved January 7, 2008.
  4. ↑ Doran, James (December 23, 2006). "Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google". The Times. London. Archived from the original on December 27, 2006. Retrieved January 6, 2007.
  5. ↑ "About search". Archived from the original on November 21, 2007. Retrieved January 10, 2008.
  6. ↑ "Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia". Search Engine Land. December 29, 2006. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  7. ↑ Wales: Search Wikia Will Succeed Where Google Cannot, InformationWeek, February 5, 2007. Retrieved July 27, 2007. Archived March 7, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  8. ↑ Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo, Reuters, March 8, 2007. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  9. ↑ Jonathan Thaw, Wikia plans editable Web search engine, Bloomberg News, March 10, 2007
  10. ↑ Wales, Jimmy (December 24, 2007). "private pre-alpha invites available". Archived from the original on December 28, 2007. Retrieved December 24, 2007.
  11. ↑ "Wikia Search Project to Launch January 7, Wales says". The Washington Post. December 24, 2007. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  12. ↑ Wikia Search opens its doors, Heise Online, June 6, 2008. Archived June 10, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  13. ↑ "Second Wikia Search version gets backing from former critics, Computer World, June 4, 2008". Archived from the original on June 5, 2008. Retrieved June 5, 2008.
  14. ↑ "Search.wikia.com". Archived from the original on October 11, 2008. Retrieved October 18, 2008.
  15. ↑ Wikia Search, Cuil trailing Google by a long shot, Network World, August 19, 2008 Archived August 21, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  16. ↑ Boulton, Clint (August 28, 2008). "Google Search Ranking Feature Threatens Wikia Search". eWeek . Ziff Davis Media. Retrieved June 1, 2018.
  17. ↑ Wales giving up on Wikia Search
  18. ↑ "Svn.swlabs.org". Archived from the original on March 28, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  19. ↑ "Search.wikia.com". Archived from the original on April 28, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  20. ↑ "N2.nabble.com". Archived from the original on February 17, 2009. Retrieved February 14, 2009.
  21. ↑ "Not-quite-ready-yet.index.swlabs.org". Archived from the original on July 28, 2011. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  22. ↑ Jonas, Trevor (January 7, 2008). "Wikia, Jimmy Wales Unveil First Public Alpha of Open Source Search Project". BusinessWire.com. Archived from the original on June 6, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2008.
  23. ↑ "Swlabs.org". Archived from the original on April 16, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  24. ↑ The JavaScript code that fetches search results from the index server [ dead link ] directly refers to the current index servers. Archived July 28, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  25. ↑ "Re.search.wikia.com". Archived from the original on October 16, 2008. Retrieved October 18, 2008.
  26. ↑ "Re.search.wikia.com". Archived from the original on April 7, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  27. ↑ "Searchwiki.wikia.com". Archived from the original on February 5, 2010. Retrieved November 30, 2009.
  28. ↑ "The copyrights page of Search Wikia". Archived from the original on May 17, 2008. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  29. ↑ Beesley, Angela (February 4, 2008). "Re: Mandate". searchwiki (Mailing list). Retrieved May 12, 2008.[ dead link ]
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