Let’s face it web search engines are oftentimes frustratingly useless (don’t get me started on Technorati’s useless search engine). Take my recent Google search for “vga cables“. What I wanted to know is what the heck is a vga cable. What I got was a bunch of links to sites where I can purchase them. I thought perhaps a different sort of search engine might do me better, so I typed the following into Ask.com’s search box: “What is a vga cable”. Supposedly Ask understands plain English, so I expected to get results that looked like definitions, not store fronts. Alas, I was wrong. Ask’s results were nearly the same as those of Google. Please, somebody help me.
Dah-tah-dah…Jimmy Wales to the rescue. Well, it’s been almost a month since Wikia Search launched an alpha preview of its new-fangled search engine. By coincidence, I happened to discover Wikia Search on the very day of its release. Though the search engine wasn’t very useful (indeed, TechCrunch panned it fairly badly), I was incredibly excited about its potential (and it has a pretty interface, too).
Grass-roots works when enough people care. I figure that there are millions of people like me, tired of crappy search results. It may take a while for Wikia Search to mature, but once it does, it will break the Google monolith. Google doesn’t improve its search because it has no competitors. It’s acting like any monopoly would. This is a call to arms to all you wikipedians and fellow-travelers! Let’s hasten the fall of Google search (or preferably, it’s improvement).
