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A post at TechCrunch today boasts that Wikia is “beginning to suck a lot less.”
The wiki based search product is supposedly stepping up its game through the implementation of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results.
These new features make the system harder to gain, and spammers easier to oust.
Jimmy Wales admitted to the lack of quality his site has shown and stated that it:
Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.
The thing that really strikes me about Wikia.com is that the top result for every search is a Wikipedia entry. As search marketers know the first listing garners over 40% of the overall search traffic for a term. Doesn’t this make Wikia.com feel like a Wikipedia search engine, more than a wiki based search engine?
While I do find the interface to be cleaner, and the AJAX functionality easier to use, I still fail to see how the editor created search engine will not be drastically effected by spammers in some way. Editors do not keep spam out of Wikipedia, they simply favor one type of spam over another, won’t the same happen here?
It seems that Wikia.com may simply be hoping that cosmetic changes will equal more relevant results. I don’t see the correlation.
