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Wikia Search

Wikia Search is a project to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine, run by Wikia.

Wikia Search is still very much under development, and we are aware that the quality of the search results is low. What you see here is our second alpha release. We are deeply indebted to Nutch and Lucene and wish to support their further development.

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

What you can do to help

Plug in at the Community Portal or help with the "mini articles" that appear at the top of popular search terms. These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:

• Short definitions
• Disambiguations
• Photos
• See also
• Questions
• Did you mean

There is a policy discussion regarding Mini articles and related issues at search:Mini article/Policy discussion.

At the bottom of every page is a link to Post bug reports. Please use that link liberally to give us large amounts of feedback.

Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and therefore it can and should be done in an open, objective, accountable way. This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search.

Please feel free to join us, make some friends, and let's try to do something friendly, interesting, and different.

Principles

Our Organizing Principles (TCQP, after the initials) - the goals that we think Internet Search should have:

1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

News

Currently, the search-l mailing list is the place to go to look for news on the Wikia Search project. Updates that were posted there are not necessarily linked to from here.

• 2008/05/29: More news from the search team were posted on search-l.
• 2008/05/20: News about what the Wikia Search team has been working on have been posted on the search-l mailing list.
• 2008/04/09: Bleeding edge version of the user interface hosted here for current development.
• 2008/02/09: Internet Explorer users can now login/create account to the wiki. [1] [2] Wikiasearch-unable-to-login-ie6.JPG
• 2008/01/26: Special:ProblemReports now can show the descriptions.
• 2008/01/24: At the DLD08 conference in Munich, in a panel discussion titled "Humans disrupting algorithms", Maholo's Jason Calacanis, moderator David Kirkpatrick, and Wikia's Jimmy Wales talked about the topic of web search. Jeff Jarvis reported on the discussion at his blog.
• 2008/01/22: Moving pages using the "More Actions -> Move" feature now works. This can be used to move pages with mini article content, but which were created in the main namespace, to the Mini namespace.

Pages that might be of interest

• search:Mini article/Policy discussion
• Social Lab - sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
• Distributed Lab - projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
• Semantic Lab - Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
• Standards Lab - formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.
• Development User Interface - A bleeding edge version of the user interface is available here. Be aware that this is likely to be broken most of the time.
• Links to the source code for various components of search wikia