Wikia Spam = Good

This week’s launch: Wikia Search, the user-edited search engine from the folks who brought you Wikipedia. An algorithm does the “heavy-lifting” to find information; users do the refinement to perfect the rankings. As Michael Arrington observes and Silicon Alley Insider opines, Wikia Search sucks.

But the human editors haven’t started work yet (editing features aren’t even turned on)—so it’s unfair to pass a hasty judgment. Indeed, my prediction is for good things from Wikia Search. And spam will be the reason.

As 360i’s David Berkowitz noted in Search Insider last year, the ease of human editing will make Wikia Search a spammer’s delight. But enough spammers may just cancel each other out—and crowd wisdom will lead to the best results.

Sure, the engine sucks now. But that’s because it hasn’t been sufficiently spammed yet.

Keep Users, Lose Searchers

If you don’t like that big, pesky Yahoo search box on your My Yahoo page, you can now make it smaller. The Yahoo Blog reports: “My Yahoo! now offers a ‘small search box’ setting to help minimize the search box up top.”

Of course, a smaller search box will mean that fewer Yahoo users will end up paying attention to their own Yahoo search bars—which means that Yahoo has chosen to sacrifice its search share so as to keep more of its My Yahoo users happy.

Good idea? Bad idea? We’ll have to see. Either way, it’s one more sign that Yahoo has thrown in the towel on being the search giant, and is looking to focus on staying on top as a web portal.

TV Guide, Search, and Media Relationships

TV Guide wants to be the new leader in video search. In announcing the product, Eileen Murphy, TV Guide’s senior vice president for corporate communications, was quoted in MediaPost as touting her company’s “good relationships with many of the sites they’ll be scraping” as a point of strength to the product.

At least on one level, TV Guide’s reference to “good relations” looks like a reference to—and swipe at—Google, which does not have good relations with, say, Viacom. And the reference raises an interesting question in our synergistic age, in which there’s a thin line between acting as a search engine and hosting (or stealing) information, as YouTube has shown. (For more on that thin search/hosting line, see an article on the topic by Did-it’s Mark Simon.)

The question is: are we moving into a new age for search engines, in which algorithms and technology are just part of the picture—the rest of the picture being relationship management with the engines’ sources of information?