Wikia Released But Obvious Problems.
Finally a couple of days ago Wikia was released. We have been hearing publicity for this search engine for some time.
Wikia is of course only in beta mode at the moment but I already have a couple of problems with it.
Firstly try a search for anything you wish. Do you actually get decent results? No the results received are absolutely atrocious. I noticed on a blog I am a regular on that if you carry out a search for George Bush (1 of the most well known names in the world at the moment) the top result is a site telling me that George Bush is a crack whore. They also display pictures if you search for a name and they could only find 1 picture of the real George Bush.
Secondly I visited this page. I tried a search.
I was presented with an error stating that the server could not be found. Looking at the address bar I find that it is looking for http://http//re.search.wikia.com/search#seo. Notice the http://http://. That would certainly account for a server not found error. I went back to the page I tried the search from to find why this happened. Looking at the javascript for the page I find the following:-
function search(){
window.location='http://http://re.search.wikia.com/search#'+$('q2').value;
return false;
}
As you can see they have actually hard coded an incorrect search URL within the javascript. Come on wikia if you cannot actually handle something so simple how are you going to manage a search engine?
Wikia has got a long way to go before it is going to be any use to anyone.
Tags: flop, search engine, useless, wikia