We looked at people-powered editable search engine Wikia back in January when it was in alpha. At the time they were still in alpha, with poor results but plans to let users refine things by contributing articles to result pages. Now they’ve relaunched, as a search engine crossed with a full-fledged wiki. What does this mean? If you search for a term, say “web work,” and you’re not happy with the results, you can change them. Specifically, you can add or delete sites, mark particular results as spotlighted, or use a rating system to move them up or down the page.
Wikia is hoping that the same sort of community self-policing that’s been the backbone of Wikipedia will keep people from making a mockery of its results pages. So far, although the early activity is running at close to 1 update per second, the spammers don’t seem to have discovered this yet; pages for “valium” or porn terms haven’t been seeded with new results. But it’s probably only a matter of time before that happens, opening up the question: do you trust your peers to help pick the most relevant search results, even with the monetary incentive of driving traffic to particular sites?
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/06\/03\/wikia-goes-editable-do-you-trust-it\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_b47a184722a4a4bad7c7a29e793ab1e9","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}