Wikia Search - Will it end up being like Digg ?

Wikia Search is the latest search engine in the block and is getting lot of buzz these days. Almost each and every blogger high profile blogger has covered (Matt Cutts, Michael Arrington, Rafe Needleman are among few). Wikia Search - The human powered search engine. Yes, that’s what Wikia search is about.

It’s a service which combines search algorithm with human efforts with the *hope* of building a better search engine and which can really give competition to the search engine giant I.e. Google!

Now, lets see how Wikia works :

Wikia Search will index the web pages from the web and later the users will give rating to the search results and that will eventually help in the improving (I wanted to write demolishing but Jimmy Wales, founder of WikiPedia thinks that it will improve) the search results.

What is against Wikia :

Well, personally I think it’s a great idea and it really should be the case that people can decide that what is more legitimate and should stand at the top in the results but do you really think that will happen ?

I think it will end up being like Digg! A mob of people who’ll decide that what’ll stay on the top and what’ll stay behind. Apart from that, the chances are that some SEM companies will hire many people and will ask them to manipulate the search results for the benefit of their clients.

Jimmy Wales himself says that one can’t expect great search results from Wikia from the day 1 (fair enough) and says that it will take around 2 years for Wikia to reach to a level where it will be able to yield search results competitive to current search engine ruler (as seen on RLSlog). Well, not expecting great results on the day 1 is completely acceptable but c’mon, 2 years to be able to be where Google is right now is completely useless!

Why will people work hard for Wikia for next 2 years, when Google is already giving the same search results which we can expect from Wikia, 2 years from now!

What may work for Wikia :

The only thing which may work for Wikia is that they give incentives to its users. WikiPedia is non-profit project, so people didn’t expect anything from it but knowledge! However, Wikia is a for-profit project and I really don’t see any reason that why anyone will invest his/her time in improving the search results. Well, people may say that Digg is also the same but then as I mentioned that it will be only run by bunch of guys who’ll take care of the Wikia’s search results and which may not be completely relevant!

Apart from that, what can work is that if they employee lots and lots of people who’ll kick out the spammers and will mark their votes as invalid. It can’t be done with couple of people but yes, it will really require lot of people but the question is that can Wikia hire these many people ?

If it works, then what are the chances that it’ll stay properly :

Well, lets say that it works and with the help of some generous people and who have nothing better in their lives (no offence), they start producing some really good search results, then what’s the guarantee that those high profile people won’t sell their souls for some good amount of money to rank some ordinary website ?

I really hope that Wikia works but as businessman/user I don’t see any practical working model in Wikia.