First look at Wikia
OK it’s been a couple of days since the launch of the social search engine and my earlier disappointment has been replaced by a sense of – well – apathy. I’m no longer angry at the crappy results or the fact that their crawler had managed to completely miss by site.
For any commercial searches (You know, the ones with lots of spam) nearly all the top 10 are littered with keyword rich hyphenated domains. On a search for ‘cheap flights’ it even pulls in a picture of some bloke, just cos he said he’s interested in cheap space flights.
The ‘search engine marketing’ SERP was like a journey back in time. There were sites in there that Google, hell even Yahoo kicked out years ago.
And no real sense of Geo targeting or localisation – guess we won’t be using it to find loans or mortgages or any local business
Ok I’ve got it – this IS like a very basic search engine and indeed it is based on the open source engine nutch. Great at basic on-page relevance.
The clever bit comes once the user base start to provide their expertise. This may yet do something useful or at least vaguely interesting but I’m not holding my breath. I love the idea of using social signals to drive search, but this is not going to fly anytime soon and I’m guessing never. No wonder Matt Cutts was happy to welcome them into this space
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