Wales caught lightning in a bottle with Wikipedia by harnessing the idealistic tendencies of a global army of contributors. This idealism was absent with Wikia Search, and, unlike with Mahalo, FindingDulcinea (www.FindingDulcinea.com) and other human-powered search alternatives, there was no core of paid contributors to create a critical mass of content, upon which others may have built.
Marco
· 8 months ago
I don't think that human-powered search engines will ever be better than Google. Wikia Search was simply not useful. Even if it had some good search results - they weren't better than Google's. Other human-powered engines won't be the best search engine, either. Mahalo, for example, is more like Wikipedia with a snippet of results from Google. You could simply make this as a mashup of Google and Wikipedia. If there was a search engine better than Google, it would be a semantic one, not human-powered.
Adam Jusko
· 8 months ago
Well, the fact that Search Wikia was a for-profit venture that wanted its searchers to contribute for free sort of doomed it from the start. Don't really see that the economy has anything to do with it, unless Jimmy Wales is saying he couldn't pay his developers.
Kind of sad to hear this, actually, because I liked that Search Wikia put some spotlight on human-powered search, which helped our site Bessed to be easily understood when we explained the concept. We'll keep plugging away, though, as we're still growing, and God knows Jason Calacanis makes enough noise in this space that the human-powered aspect of search will not go down quietly.
Tschai
· 8 months ago
Not surprised at all...
I tried it out in the beginning and it was not easy enough compared with traditional search engines and it had to start from scratch (almost). And I guess it never made it to the general public at all...
Jason
· 8 months ago
The Wikia team tried hard and for that we should commend them. They added some interesting features, including voting comments up and down--something google was testing before Wikia launched them, but that Google launched after Wikia (according to Matt Cutts on Twitter moments ago).
I think the big mistake is they tried to take on google directly. We are "taking on" google with about 20% of our service (the top 7 links), the rest of what we do is high-quality, original content which gets indexed within Google.
The best way to win vs. Google is not compete with them, but rather co-exist with them/along side them.
On another note, Mahalo is hiring developers so if any of the Wikia staff is looking for work send me their resume at jason at mahalo.com. We have four years of capital in the bank and will hit breakeven in the next 9-12 months. We've well over five million monthly uniques and Mahalo 2.0 comes out in June and it's really solid I think. Should get us to 10m uniques--which would make us very profitable.
Jason
· 8 months ago
Do we really need to call Mahalo a 'human powered search engine'? Do we use the same phrase for About.com? Best of the Web?
Laura Hale
· 8 months ago
Mahalo, according to Jason's own admission, is less human powered and more "Paid contributor driven" so as to prevent gaming the system. If you run certain types of sites, it means that you're more likely to be left out as more trusted sources are plastered all over the place. (It often feels like Mahalo's pages could just be renamed as "Aggregators of Wikipedia, and IMDB.") Smaller sites are sort of locked out because Jason wants to prevent SEO folks from gaming the system. That's great but it also means lots of legitimate content gets excluded. And even if you're listed, it doesn't help smaller sites much at all in terms of visibility, exposure and traffic.
Mahalo is less of a search engine and more of a potential Wikipedia competitor. It does more than aggregate selected links like DMOZ. It provides a lot of information in the sidebar. It organizes information that really is kind of interesting. It has the potential to do more than it is just with how it is laid out.
I'm just not certain how well that will ultimately work out because when you are relying on paid contributors, not giving your visitors any real investment in your core product, making it difficult for small businesses to use your site to help them, meh. I'm just cynical. :/ I've yet to find a reason to use Mahalo for search because none of the content I want to search for is searchable there.
*babbles*
homepage
· 8 months ago
I guess they should have done a longer beta that wasn't open to everyone.
All Comments
If there was a search engine better than Google, it would be a semantic one, not human-powered.
Kind of sad to hear this, actually, because I liked that Search Wikia put some spotlight on human-powered search, which helped our site Bessed to be easily understood when we explained the concept. We'll keep plugging away, though, as we're still growing, and God knows Jason Calacanis makes enough noise in this space that the human-powered aspect of search will not go down quietly.
I tried it out in the beginning and it was not easy enough compared with traditional search engines and it had to start from scratch (almost).
And I guess it never made it to the general public at all...
I think the big mistake is they tried to take on google directly. We are "taking on" google with about 20% of our service (the top 7 links), the rest of what we do is high-quality, original content which gets indexed within Google.
The best way to win vs. Google is not compete with them, but rather co-exist with them/along side them.
On another note, Mahalo is hiring developers so if any of the Wikia staff is looking for work send me their resume at jason at mahalo.com. We have four years of capital in the bank and will hit breakeven in the next 9-12 months. We've well over five million monthly uniques and Mahalo 2.0 comes out in June and it's really solid I think. Should get us to 10m uniques--which would make us very profitable.
Mahalo is less of a search engine and more of a potential Wikipedia competitor. It does more than aggregate selected links like DMOZ. It provides a lot of information in the sidebar. It organizes information that really is kind of interesting. It has the potential to do more than it is just with how it is laid out.
I'm just not certain how well that will ultimately work out because when you are relying on paid contributors, not giving your visitors any real investment in your core product, making it difficult for small businesses to use your site to help them, meh. I'm just cynical. :/ I've yet to find a reason to use Mahalo for search because none of the content I want to search for is searchable there.
*babbles*