I am a big fan of Wikipedia and had been waiting for the launch of the Wikia search engine. I tried it as soon as it launched and liked the clean interface and the manner in which the search results are presented. Wikia uses the open source Nutch search engine. There is an explanation of rankings alongside the search results (though this would be useless to the layman, it provides transparency to the search results).

An interesting aspect of the search is the request for a “mini-article” on the search query. Presumably, this will be the first result of the search query after the “mini-article” gains in quality. I was surprised that Wikia doesn’t use the Wikipedia page on the topic as the first search result, especially because other search engines point to Wikipedia pages as the first search result about 30% of the time.

Community based personalization of search results is a promising direction for improving search results. Wikia combines a search engine with a social network and it would be interesting to see how the effects of being part of different communities beings to impact the search results. Wikia should make the community based ranking algorithm public at the earliest so that it could benefit from reviews by experts.

I think it is premature to evaluate the results and think it will take some time before the effects of the community rating on the search results kicks in. In any case, it is pretty hard to compare search engines. I have been experimenting with different search engines lately. I have not observed any significant differences in the quality of search results (or in the speed of retrieval) when I switched search engines. Most of the query specific ads are not very relevant in India, so the quality of ads also do not influence search engine preference.

Finally, what about the personalization feature claimed by search engines? This has been a big disappointment. I have given enough data to search engines to personalize the results for me. At least in my books, the quality of the personalized results so far do not compensate the privacy risk I have taken in providing data to search engines.