Archive for the ‘Search’ Category
- In: Company | Google | Search | Yahoo
- 4 Comments
Seems like Yahoo’s trying their hands at rearranging the search display. We are so used to using google and i think can hardly imagine search results in a different layout
However, I remember being asked by someone(actually in an interview) what would you change in google search and first thing that came to my mind was- “Change the Display”
Anyways back to Glue, yahoo’s new search display project.
First look and you say what the ***** …… Search for something and you get what looks like a Websites Home page itself…..Disastrous….
I think the whole notion of giving images,video and other media formats relevant to what you search is a bit funny…… HOwever I understand for relatively simple web users this might be helpful…But puttin all the format results in one page ..is it really the best UI idea that Yahoo comes up with?????
U’d rather display normal search results with tabs to access video n pics ….which thus keep populating at the back while u browse thru sites ….. Have a look at the Pic and decide for yourself…..dont forget to comment…..
One change i’d love to see in search results display would be to display web pages as(hidden text) very low res pics decently sized ….This because u most of the times know by just having a first look at the page whether its what you searched for…..Well snapping billions of homepages not a herculean task for Google or yahoo …..anyways ive given up one of my best startup ideas…..Any body to invest in me????
O! I’d love to be in the Product Team of Glue, boy do i have some ideas 🙂 kiddin ….
TechCrunch on Wikia
Posted January 8, 2008
on:Wikia Search Launches Private Beta; Public Launch On January 7
Michael Arrington
Well, the waiting appears to be over, and the promised 2007 launch date was technically achieved. Wikipedia/Wikia Founder Jimmy Wales has publicly announced the private beta for Wikia Search – right now. And the public launch is set for January 7. In a note to the Wikia Search email list
a few minutes ago, he wrote:
From: jwales@xxxxx.com
Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available
Date: December 23, 2007 7:04:01 PM PST
To: search-l@wikia.com
Reply-To: search-l@wikia.comPing me if you want one…. we’re launched.
I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we
are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the
system with help from people to complain about what is broken…Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t
answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here.–Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Search-l mailing list
Search-l@wikia.com
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
Change options or unsubscribe: http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l
I spoke with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina on the the rules around the beta – users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch on January 7. Hopefully people will respect that – there are bound to be some major hiccups and Wikia deserves a chance to iron those out before what is sure to be a ton of attention on the product.
- In: Search
- 3 Comments
Introduction
Wikia Search: 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.
This is what Nikolaj has to say on O’Reilly radar
This morning Jimbo Wales’ Wikia launched their search effort, Wikia Search. Wales & co. have been getting a lot of heat for this launch, most notably from Mike Arrington at Techcrunch who calls Wikia Search “an inexcusable waste of time” and “a complete letdown”.
I have to be honest that my first reaction to Wikia Search was lukewarm, and I fully support Arrington in his assessment that Wikia Search is no viable replacement for Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, or any of the other established search players. But Wales takes out the air of Arrington’s choler by commenting that “it’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine”, recalling that
When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!
Were Wales goes wrong is that Wikia has released a search engine on a limited index with no opportunity for users to contribute. In terms of Wikipedia, it would be the equivalent of launching an out-of-copyright dictionary but giving users no ability to edit the erroneous articles or adding new. Wikia should not have launched without, and that is a mistake.
Yet Wikia will change search. They may very well be run overend by Google, Yahoo!, or Facebook (who eventually will turn towards search like their fraternal predecessor AOL) in the process of doing so, but they’ll change a few rules of the game.
First, values
AOL’s search log blunder was notorious, and generally people are slowly starting to question the potential privacy invasion from our online data trails.
A Wikia employee told me today that people were already asking what the most popular search terms were. He said there was no way of finding out as no logs are kept.
Second, they’ll open search. Really.
Wikia claims that they’ll make their index freely available. If they haven’t already, we’ll almost certainly see Wikia’s index in Amazon’s S3 (Amazon is a major investor), making it effortless to create custom search engines using a couple EC2 instances. Think vertical search engines with custom algorithms for anything from gaming to Japanese manga cartoons. Talk about giving Google’s 16K employee brute-force machine competition.
Go play with Wikia Search. Then come back here and read the above again. Tell me what you see: a bluff or a ripple of change?
Disclosure: Fellow Radar blogger Artur Bergman is Director of Engineering at Wikia, and I’m posting this just a few hundred meters down the road from their Poznan (Poland) office.
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