Today’s the day Jimmy Wales’ open search project Wikia Search goes alpha, bringing in a new flavor of a human-machine-hybrid. (Some thoughts on human vs machine based search.)
By now, the first reviews of the Wikia Search alpha are coming in, with so so results. Techcrunch‘s Michael Arrington rips it apart for not involving humans yet. Mashable could not find anything good to say. Others think it should be more “polished“. As for the human factor: Agreed. But a more polished alpha? Come on!
Even with those reviews in mind, Wikia Search has all the social networking features built in, or planned. Which in turn means that the search result are – at some stage – going to be social graph-powered, i.e. the search will be based on your social network. No matter what Wikia Search looks like today, there’s a massive potential here.
