The Times’ piece on the launch is up.
“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.
If Wikia really wants to make this a community-generated search engine than the demo attached will do just that – http://tinyurl.com/yvah8w
PredictAd Search Assist has a collaborative filtering feature that learns community search patterns. If you start typing in the demo attached you will start getting autocomplete results (with contextual advertisements) – these results will optimize based on the popularity of certain search terms/phrases.
If Jimmy Wales is reading – take a close look…PredictAd is FREE and its contextual advertising platform gives the publisher something that Adwords simply doesn’t! Moreover, it’s the first Ajax service offered on the web, and it’s a cool one at that…