By K.C. JonesInformationWeek
The changes, unveiled Tuesday, let users edit, comment on, add, and delete search results. Wikia, formerly Wikicities, released its alpha version of an open source search engine in January. The company said this week that it has attracted about 20,000 registered users who have written nearly 25,000 mini-articles and made almost 60,000 edits.
The company hopes the recent changes will increase user engagement and make search more interactive.
Users can edit results, titles, and summaries. The changes are immediately available to all Wikia Search users. Results can be rated on a five-star scale, with comments, and contributors can add related searches. Users also can preview sites, text, images, and links from the listings of search results. Wikia also will allow users to click once to try their searches with other search engines.
"Collectively, these new features put us a step closer to our goal of making the search process a much more participatory and democratic one," said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman of Wikia. "So, if someone runs a search and doesn't find the result they're looking for, we're giving them the power to go in and fix it. It continues to be our belief that, over time, by adding the human element into search we'll be able to produce more relevant, insightful results."
Wikia Search also added "activity" feeds and other improvements to its profile pages so people can display and discuss recent changes.
Like its cousin Wikipedia, the search engine lists all changes and edits.
To help explain how easy the process is, Wales released a video to demonstrate the changes to Wikia Search.
See original article on InformationWeek
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