Playing around a little, if I do a search for “Buddha” on Wikia, the wikipedia article on it does not even appear in the top ten; on Google; the wikipedia article is number one. That seems a little odd.
Good question. They have a huge database, and links are displayed to wikipedia for a lot of query in Google, Yahoo and Live and not in Wikia… That is interesting.
I think one of the major hurdles that Wikia will have to overcome is attracting users to their site and actually getting them to sign up and contribute, the two essential factors upon which Wikia is based. There are currently few profiles which reveals that Wikia has clearly not yet attracted a following yet. Although I believe the concept has great potential and is in keeping with the present popularity of user based sites, it will take more than what Wikia is presently doing to lure people away from strictly using Google as their go-to search engine of choice.
Good observation, John. We (VentureBeat) spoke with Jimmy Wales on Friday and he did confirm that Wikia was doing a deep crawl of Wikipedia and that Wikipedia results would likely rank pretty high in search results.
We reviewed the service today and found that that was not the case at all, so the indexing must be in progress still.
Playing around a little, if I do a search for “Buddha” on Wikia, the wikipedia article on it does not even appear in the top ten; on Google; the wikipedia article is number one. That seems a little odd.
Good question. They have a huge database, and links are displayed to wikipedia for a lot of query in Google, Yahoo and Live and not in Wikia… That is interesting.
I think one of the major hurdles that Wikia will have to overcome is attracting users to their site and actually getting them to sign up and contribute, the two essential factors upon which Wikia is based. There are currently few profiles which reveals that Wikia has clearly not yet attracted a following yet. Although I believe the concept has great potential and is in keeping with the present popularity of user based sites, it will take more than what Wikia is presently doing to lure people away from strictly using Google as their go-to search engine of choice.
Wow! It is interesting.
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http://www.bywifi.com — Mobile Transcoding of Videos and Web Pages for Mobile Phone and PDA
Good observation, John. We (VentureBeat) spoke with Jimmy Wales on Friday and he did confirm that Wikia was doing a deep crawl of Wikipedia and that Wikipedia results would likely rank pretty high in search results.
We reviewed the service today and found that that was not the case at all, so the indexing must be in progress still.
See our coverage here: http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/06/search-wikia-launches-will-it-threaten-google/