4 ms·
Wales giving up on Wikia Search
- adatta02 18y agoI'm sad to see the doors close on Wikia Search. I was an intern in the NYC office last summer. The project had a refreshingly open philosophy and was built using FOSS components. At least the index is still available at http://index.isc.org/ http://index.isc.org/
- thorax 18y agoYeah, I was a big fan of the idea. Clearly Google saw the potential, too. I almost wish it wasn't a part of Google. I'd like to have two offerings that are totally different-- one that's 100% pagerank and one that trends towards user-ranked. Right now we're kind of losing out on the latter because Google isn't necessarily taking into account the user rankings across accounts.
- breck 18y agoI'm very surprised it's shutting down. 3M uniques a month and still growing according to Compete. Seems like it would have gotten acquired at the very least.
- michael_nielsen 18y agoDoesn't look like the index is downloadable in any useful form. The links just lead to what appears to be a moribund mailing list.
- ckinnan 18y agoThe article also mentions Microsoft is shuttering Encarta-- a victim of Wales' Wikipedia. Win some, lose some.
- josefresco 18y agoThere's an opportunity here for a hacker with low overhead to move into this market of an 'open search engine'. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'user powered' but should be much more open than Google/Yahoo/MSN's mighty algorithms.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoAny particular suggestions?
- j2d2 18y agoI usually use google to search the wiki.
- jgamman 18y agoI guess they're just busy trying to avoid beaching themselves and trying to hear themselves think with all that ultra-low frequency sonar bouncing around these days. I mean, we all get a little User Generated Content fatigue now and again. Now imagine how hard it is to type with those really big flippers.