Wikia Search: Weapons Grade Fail

Ted / 10.Jan.2008

Anybody can find instructions on the internet describing how to build fail. But building catastrophic fail requires that you enrich it, which takes teams of scientists and machines and shit.

The National Intelligence Estimate now tells us that Wikia, Jimmy Wales's attempt to make money from his Wikipedia clout, has been working on a fail-enrichment program for some time. This program is called Wikia Search.

Jason Calacanis Doesn't Afraid Of Anything

Here's the story: Wikia has set up Nutch, a mediocre open source search engine, and laid a wiki on top of it. You can write a mini wiki page for your search result if you don't like what Nutch comes up with. This is even more craptacular than Mahalo.

So okay. You are building an open source search engine. You use a piece of software whose ranking algorithms are freely available and you let anonymous users author search results pages? What could possibly go wrong?

I Am Going To The Crunchies Tomorrow With Valleywag

At least Wikia knows about their own fail. In bold, on the site, they have written: We are aware that the quality of the search results is low. They are ballaching that Wikia is a "proof of concept" and that they need user feedback data. Fuck that. Jimmy Wales hyped this thing from the beginning, and it's a disaster. Your thing sucks out of the gate, and now nobody is going to pay attention to you.

oooh, but I started Wikipedia... So what? You made one project that didn't have any original engineering, and now you're doing another. Big fucking surprise.

By now it should be painfully obvious that crawling and indexing the web is a hard problem. Google and Yahoo have a lot of competent engineers working on this (praise be to Cutting), and you expected to do it in six months? One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Anywho, you can expect to see more backpedaling out of Wikia in the coming weeks, that is, if the media hasn't already forgot about them. Out of the gate, Wikia Search is shittier than Mahalo, which speaks a lot to the quality of the fail they have developed. Keep it up, guys. Maybe hire yourself an engineer who can think for himself instead of just stitching together open source software and calling it a product?

add to del.icio.us, digg it, rabble reddit wikia

35 Comments

Wikipedia == useful Open source search engine == spammer's wet dream
steve steve / 10.Jan.2008 at 10:47am
is persai going to suck out of the gate?
persai persai / 10.Jan.2008 at 10:57am
in after jersai
assouch assouch / 10.Jan.2008 at 11:23am
FINALLY! I can call off the attack dogs now. Mordor ref ftw
m0nty m0nty / 10.Jan.2008 at 11:29am
Weapons Grade Fail is now a meme
nin-mofo nin-mofo / 10.Jan.2008 at 11:43am
"This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search." --- LOL WUT
nin-mofo nin-mofo / 10.Jan.2008 at 11:46am
"We are aware that the quality of the search results is low......... So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often. " Are you kidding me with this shit!?!? And to top it off, they go live with the links at the bottom of their site not linking to anything. What a bunch of etards!
tman tman / 10.Jan.2008 at 12:06pm
if someone does some original engineering in the bay area but no one uses it, does it make a sound?
me me / 10.Jan.2008 at 12:45pm
First question: Who would use such services to begin with? I dont get the model. I use the usual suspects, Google, and the other search boxes in the Firefox doohickey. Even the high-end search add-ons from the BI text vendors that refine Google return results are more trouble than they are worth, and they're free! (Attensity, Clear forest, blech).
Alan Wilensky alan wilensky / 10.Jan.2008 at 12:52pm
I accidentally clicked in the white space to the right of all the text in the About Wikia section of their search page and the whole page turned chinky - did this happen to anyone else? There's no graphics or anything but if you mouse in that area some alt tags appear that seem to indicate different languages... wtf?
pepelicious pepelicious / 10.Jan.2008 at 01:42pm
are you going to behave at The Crunchies? I hope not.
mike not arrington mike not arrington / 10.Jan.2008 at 01:48pm
Fuck me for viewing that page in IE ... I guess that feature only works in Firefox. I can has browser compatibility?
pepelicious pepelicious / 10.Jan.2008 at 01:50pm
http://www.amishrakefight.org/gfy/
mookat mookat / 10.Jan.2008 at 02:33pm
"One does not simply walk into Mordor." LOL
Me, a reader me, a reader / 10.Jan.2008 at 02:53pm
"This is even more craptacular than Mahalo" You probably think that hurts my feelings. Well.. Eyes welling up. Uhhhh. It _does_ hurt my feelings. Excactly what do you mean more craptacular. Define your terms. Are you sure Nick Denton isn't behind this somewhere. Mahalo is not more craptacular than Wikia. Wikia is more. OK. Now stop writing about me.
jason not calacanis jason not calacanis / 10.Jan.2008 at 02:57pm
>>>which takes teams of scientists and machines and shit. ... has been working on a fail-enrichment program for some time. // Goddam, the web is a pile of shit while you're on vacation. No more outings for you. From now on, we'll have the call grrlz *delivered*.
Mike Cane mike cane / 10.Jan.2008 at 03:49pm
Wikia + No Captchas for Account Creation = Spamapalooza
argh argh / 10.Jan.2008 at 04:57pm
I'll take a LoTR reference on uncov FTW!
uncov-fan uncov-fan / 10.Jan.2008 at 04:59pm
Searching for "porn" on google gets 226,000,000 hits. Searching for "porn" on wikia gets 39,168 hits. Now THAT'S an epic fail.
Bruce P. Henry bruce p. henry / 11.Jan.2008 at 01:43am
I thought wikia was supposed to be a search engine? Things either just totally escaped me or that's got to be about one of the worst things I've seen in a while. Only thing going is that fart cloud. Yeahh.... "bbbrrrrrt"
paul paul / 11.Jan.2008 at 02:52am
Isn't Persai just Nutch + Simplepie?
Frodo didn't fail frodo didn't fail / 11.Jan.2008 at 07:01pm
Exactly, Jason Calacanis is Frodo. And that is why Wikia will defeat the forces of darkness, which is this case is Sauron. I think it is about time a website showed some humility. Imagine if other crappy websites did this! Example, Windows Live Hotmail: "This site will not load, ever".
Unintended Reference Failure unintended reference failure / 12.Jan.2008 at 08:34am
Guys, stop trying to be as funny as the uncov-guys. You just sound lame *lol*
Sebastian sebastian / 12.Jan.2008 at 09:39am
OK then but why are you "laughing out loud"? From now on let's all try to be unfunny and incredibly serious like sebastian! That way we can all have more enjoyable lives!
Serious Sebastian serious sebastian / 12.Jan.2008 at 10:55am
I don't even have any idea what the hell a few of the commentors on this blog are talking about half the time. Seem to be speaking their own language and insider nerd jokes.
mike not arrington mike not arrington / 12.Jan.2008 at 01:16pm
Yeah it is weird that nerds would comment on this blog? What is "Lord of The Rings"? What the hell is that? Some kind of hip hop band? Harumph!!!
Confused confused / 12.Jan.2008 at 04:54pm
Samwise and Gandalf represent angel investors. Smeagol is Ted, and Gollum is Uncov. I have it all figured out.
arwen is my favorite arwen is my favorite / 12.Jan.2008 at 10:25pm
No, Ted would be Gollum and Uncov would be Smeagol. The Mouth of Sauron is Scoble. Venture capitalists are the nine Nazgul. Peter Thiel is Faramir. Although I don't think Faramir was gay, so I'm not sure how that jives. Calacanis is a fat piece of shit. I don't know if that equates to cave troll or not though, they're tall and as far as I know he's just kind of a wide short person.
arwen sucks, scary cate blanchett is better arwen sucks, scary cate blanchett is better / 13.Jan.2008 at 01:55am
Oh well, I suppose I stand corrected. I guess that leaves Jimmy Wales as currently unassigned.
unintended reference failure unintended reference failure / 13.Jan.2008 at 12:23pm
Jimmy Wales is Denethor. He's delusional and he wants to set Peter Thiel on fire.
scary cate blanchett scary cate blanchett / 13.Jan.2008 at 02:13pm
http://www.sophistechate.com/ Looks like Arrington found his next piece of ass. Ted, when at the Crunchies, tell us how long of a countdown to fail for him.
mike not arrington mike not arrington / 13.Jan.2008 at 08:25pm
The idea isn't all bad, but it's done better by installing Stumble Upon and integrating it with your search page (ie Google). This gets you user ranked search results, kind of a nice mix. But writing wiki pages for search results, good lord... what will they do next.
wgyouree wgyouree / 14.Jan.2008 at 03:26pm
Crucially fails again!
abacadaba abacadaba / 16.Jan.2008 at 12:06am
+1 on praise to be cutting. w3rd.
abacadaba abacadaba / 16.Jan.2008 at 12:08am
FYI the ship pictured is the M/V Torm Alexandria, which capsized on July 25, 2001, in Port Monrovia, Liberia, according to http://www.cargolaw.com/2001nightmare.heavymetal.html (which has lots info about, and pictures of, various other shipments of fail).
Finite finite / 17.Jan.2008 at 08:56pm

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