The long-awaited and much-hyped Wikia Search, a project of Jimmy Wales’ Wikia empire, launched on Monday to a chorus of jeers from Web 2.0 advocates and search experts.

Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, had expressed optimism for a community-built search engine that could beat Google by allowing folks to supply context, subject matter, and ratings that no computer algorithm could match.

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Net,” Wales wrote on the Wikia Web site. “And

we are making it open source. Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed.”

The results delivered Monday didn’t quite live up to expectations. A Wikia search for “George Bush” yielded as the top outcome “George Bush is a Crackwhore!” and several Bush joke sites. The top hits on Google, by contrast, were two Wikipedia articles and the official White House site.

Off-Base Results

When […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News