Wikia Launches Today: Wait, Isn’t This Mahalo with a Twist?

Wikia Search , the new user-generated search engine from the Wikimedia Foundation, launched today to much fanfare. Still in alpha, Wikipedia founder and CEO Jimmy Wales admits that as an alpha release, it still lacks user data, leading to poor results, but he expects the search to improve over the coming weeks.

According to Wales, the future of Internet search depends on change according to Four Organizing Principles: transparency, community, quality, and privacy. And while he claims that Wikia search has nothing whatsoever to do with a dig back at Google for their foray into the online encyclopedia arena with Knols, if you look at the "organizing principles" you'll see that Wales believes that transparency of the algorithm and not storing any user data are necessary.

And while many of the mainstream media are greeting Wikia with open arms, they seem to be forgetting one thing in their coverage: Web 2.0 already HAS a human-generated search, and that's Mahalo. Comparing the Wikia homepage with Mahalo shows both with categories broken down for top searches and results. A quick search using a popular celebrity as the search criteria nets a cut-off "featured" link to the Wikipedia article and then the third-most prominent regular link is a blog with one post? 

The piece that I guess I'm missing is why you need the extra step. Wikia search is still going through pages of user-created data in the wikis. Vetted or not, if I'm looking for documentation, I'm going to a search to a wiki to a citation to the original article, which seems needlessly cumbersome. In addition, Wales obviously has MUCH more faith in human nature than anyone else involved in search, because to expose the algorithm is to expose directions for how to game the algorithm, which usually leads to worthless results based on the SEO game.

2008 may be spent watching Wikimedia and Google duke it out unless some new companies step in to liven up the party. Me? I'm waiting for a real Semantic search.

Edited 7 January 2007 to correct screenshot image and insert link.