Wikia’s Poor Performance
Sorry, but it’s just terrible. With all the press and hoopla — almost all of it free — we’d expect better than the following example search results (which may change / be manipulated by the time you try them):
- #1 result for “Seattle” is a site that is supposed to list events, bars, restaurants, etc. but it’s completely empty.
- #1 result of “movie times” is a poor-quality page “about” Pierce Brosnan.
- #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, and #8 for “search engine” are search engine submission companies, not search engines. (You don’t need to submit to search engines.)
As many others have noted, the idea of a human-edited search engine sounds good, but it’s clear that at least for now, Wikia results are terrible and subject to manipulation by site owners. If they can’t fix the manipulation problem, they’ll never solve the quality problem.
If you’re concerned about your ranking in search engines, ignore Wikia and focus on the Big Three: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. Once Wikia attains 10% market share, it will be time to care. To put this in perspective, Ask has a lowly 2-3% market share, and they’ve been around a lot longer and spend millions on advertising. And their results don’t suck.
Pick a feed
