Well, this is one we have all been waiting for here in the Vertical Leap UK office.

Plenty of people are aware of the Wikipedia, whether you are an Internet Marketer like the staff here at VL, or whether if you are a normal searcher. Wikipedia is widely used as an information resource, I even used it when I was doing some initial research for my dissertation when I was at uni - I wasn't able to cite it directly because it was not considered of proven integrity, although I believe there is some debate as to whether or not this should continue as articles are becoming better cited, although I digress.

The point is that the Wikipedia has been a dominant force in the search engine results pages (SERPs), I think that it probably appears in the top 5 for at least 1/3 of the things that I am ever searching the internet for (although I suspect that my browsing patterns are somewhat different from a normal browser).

As a result of the prominence of the Wikipedia, there are high hopes for the Wikia Search engine - and although it has now gone public, it has been launched in "Alpha". It looks quite pretty, but not particularly different from many of the other engines' home pages.

There are options to sign up/login in the top right hand corner, the main search is performed in the middle of the screen, and there is the standard links to terms and conditions etc at the bottom (mind you, half these footer links weren't doing anything when I tried to click them).

So, when you performed a search, you are greeted with the following screen. I'm going to break down the rest of my blog looking at the different areas of these results:

First of all (section 1), I've been playing around with a number of searches on this engine, to see what kind of results it comes up with. I'm not vain I promise, but I will talk about the various results that appear when searching for my name.

So I started with a search for "Pete Handley" and "Peter Handley". With "Pete Handley", I can see a result for "Taylor Handley" on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), with the Vertical Leap home page coming second. I'm guessing that this has happened because of links to blogs like this one that I have written, as this is the only area that my name appears on the home page of our site.

The top result for "Peter Handley" is actually my uncle Mark's (a 'musician') website, and the links page at that! It is from a few years ago when I had a personal website when I was tinkering with web design (although perhaps more frustrating is that I hadn't realised it wasn't hyperlinked!). What I found strange about this URL is that the domain Google has indexed is www.markhandley.co.uk whilst Wikia Search has indexed http://81.130.202.44/markhandley - I think that my uncle may have a duplicate content issue ;-) - maybe I will help him resolve that at some point if he is nice to me.

You can also rate the pages, although at the moment you are greeted with a message saying these scores are not going to be stored permanently, presumably because they are working out how to prevent it from being spammed?

However - its all well and good just looking at their organic results, which I am sure are going to be revised and refined over time. It looks to me like Wikia search is trying to do something a bit different and incorporate some extra elements that the other big players have ignored or look to do in the future.

With the area that I have marked section 2, it appears as though you have an option to search different indexes. I think that this could end up being confusing if there are lots of indexes that you have to choose to search. When playing around with these I definitely got different results, but was particularly amused when I clicked the "?" to find out more what was going on here to read "Other indexes probably use the same engine, but contain different indexed material, so either you can experiment with the indexing method checking different kind of pages, or you can hope to get more meaningful results by selecting another one."

I think that someone needs to define this a bit more clearly as this is a bit vague.

For section 3, you can create a mini-article for a search term. When I started it was blank for my name, but I have now added the line "Peter Handley is a search engine marketer working for Vertical Leap". It does request that you don't put links in this at present, and I suppose that this quick article stub area is one part of how humans will be involved with changing the appearance of results. I think that this is open to being abused, as you don't have to be logged in to modify content here, so managing this is likely to prove problematic I suspect.

Finally, the last section (4) is photos. There aren't any appearing for the search for my name yet, but then I am a user of this and I haven't uploaded a picture yet either, so I can hardly criticise this! I think that these are users of Wikia search relevant to my search term, so in this instance, all the links point to someone called Peter. I don't seem to be listed here yet, but I only signed up this morning, maybe I will appear here soon!

In short this engine is certainly not even close to being ready, but also isn't really pretending that it is. This is a long term project for the founder of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia has been a word of mouth grower as well as a strong performer in major search engines.

 I do think that there is potential in what it looks like its trying to achieve however, so it will be interesting to see how the quality of the results develops over the coming months/years as well as the extra features that get added to it.