Analyst: Wikia Search Fails To Deliver – Yahoo! News
Analyst: Wikia Search Fails To Deliver – Yahoo! News
“But one analyst said he isn’t so sure Wales’ efforts do much to improve the current model.”
My god, give me a break. It’s an ALPHA release. This is what people don’t get about open source. In open source, you put everything out there almost all the time. People can see and criticize it and improve it all the time. You don’t keep secrets in open source. Seriously, you never even get to see Google’s alpha releases, the best you get is beta and even that is more like a “public beta” as opposed to an internal beta. Lucene’s early releases sucked, by today’s standards, but I don’t think you would say it hasn’t radically changed the search landscape. So, if an ALPHA release is, by this analyst’s account, at the same level as the current model, then Wikia probably is on to something. The fact is, they are putting the alpha version out there to attract people to try it out and get feedback as well as attract people interested in making it better.
Really, how can knowing why your results rank where they do be a bad thing? Even if Google or Y! is pure in their results, one can never know because they don’t tell you. This was the vision of creating Nutch by Doug Cutting in the first place and now Wikia has finally stepped up and put the computing resources into making this happen.
Bottom line, cut Wikia some slack. If in a year it is gone or still the same, then this analyst is right, but to say an ALPHA release does little to change things is premature. If anything, maybe it will pressure the big boys into opening up some (even Matt Cutt’s admits competition is a good thing in his comments at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wikia-launches/), as Yahoo! has recently done with Hadoop (which, by the way, is also going to put pressure on Google in the long term as well.)