Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

For over a year, the world has been hearing about Wikia.

In case you haven’t had an internet connection for the last year, Wikia has been touted as the human powered search engine that could take on Google. As you probably inferred from the name, Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales (yeah, the guy that also founded that little web site called Wikipedia).

To cut to the chase, Wikia is a disappointment. Granted, it’s currently in its Alpha phase, but as Mr. Michael Arrington noted in the comments of his review over at TechCrunch (in response to a comment left by Jimmy Wales):

And the real problem here isn’t that the search sucks. That’s beside the point. It’s that you haven’t launched any of the tools that can allow humans to make it better. Until you do, the engine can’t get any better than it is now.

Instead of blindly following Arrington’s review, here’s a quick example of why I completely agree that Wikia is one big disappointment:

Here is a Pro-Wikia quote from Jimmy Wales:

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap.”

Fair enough. As any person involved with SEO knows, the term viagra is one of the most commonly spammed search terms. So, according to Jimmy Wales, Google’s results for this term should be filled with awful spammy results, while Wikia should have results that are useful for people:

Click to Enlarge

I’ll let the results speak for themselves.