The San Jose Mercury News has a useful summary of the generally negative response to Wikia Search:
Jimmy Wales, the famous founder of Wikipedia, on Monday unveiled his new project with an unusual caveat. He warned that the quality of Wikia Search, a new open-source search engine edited by ordinary people, was "terrible."
Across the blogosphere, pundits pounced. But technologists at leading search companies defended Wales and said his efforts could benefit the entire industry.
Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, which specializes in reviews of new technology, said Wikia Search "may be one of the biggest disappointments I've had the displeasure of reviewing."
"We need 'human powered search' like a fish needs a bicycle," wrote Andrew Heenan, who publishes an Internet marketing blog called Seo2seo.
For Wales the negative reaction was all too familiar. His first project, an online encyclopedia co-written by anonymous volunteers across the Internet, was also scornfully dismissed - until it became a wildly successful digital reference currently boasting more than 9 million articles in 253 languages.
In an interview, Wales said critics of Wikia Search are missing the point. "This is a project to build a search engine, not a search engine," he explained. (The project is located at www.wikia.com.) Wales said it will take a minimum of two years before Wikia Search produces results as good as the major search engines.
Read more here. So I suppose we'll just have to wait and see ...
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