The ambitious project by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, dubbed a Google challenger in search, elicited a tepid response from reviewers.
Wikipedia took time to ramp up to its position today, and its looks like Search Wikia will need a while to get to the same place. If the launch of Search Wikia was meant to hit the ground running, we would guess it has a bad case of plantar fascitis.
That link to the painful foot condition returns a first page of search results from Search Wikia’s available resources. Some topics may have a “mini article” created about them, which would appear atop the results, but plantar fascitis doesn’t have one yet.
Of its first ten search results, only the fifth one links to a credible resource, eMedicine at WebMD. All of the other nine links go to sites of various commercial interests.
Search Wikia’s results will eventually allow people to rate the links. Doing a mouseover of a link present a group of five stars, which one can click to provide a rating. But doing that at this time returns a message, ‘Sorry, these don’t actually do anything yet 🙁 ‘.
As an alpha product, Wales and company likely do not expect a lot of great comments about Search Wikia yet. Allen Stern has been using it for several months and said it has “a long way to go in terms of interface, usability and features to get me to want to change (or add) it to the search engines.”
Michael Arrington was much less circumspect. “It may be one of the biggest disappointments I
