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Wikia Rolls Out New Features for Open Source Search Project

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) June 3, 2008 -- Wikia, Inc (http://www.wikia.com/). the company working to bring the full power of MediaWiki software to search, today provided a detailed update on its open source search project, which was launched to the public in alpha form in January. Since then, the Wikia Search project, which is creating a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration, has seen some 20,000 registered users make nearly 60,000 edits to search results and write nearly 25,000 mini articles (http://search.wikia.com/wiki/MiniArticles). Based on input from the community, the Wikia Search project rolled-out several new features today designed to make the search process more social and interactive.

Social Results

After executing a search query on any major search engine, the results page is typically static and the information displayed is largely chosen by an algorithm. Search Wikia (http://alpha.search.wikia.com/) affords users multiple opportunities to influence and customize search results, including:

?    The ability to edit any result, title and summary. The edits are then instantly available to everyone

?    The ability to add new results for any search query instantly

?    The ability to delete and/or hide any result

?    Every result item can be rated 1-5 stars, which will slowly influence the ranking position

?    The ability to add suggested and/or related searches for any query

?    The ability to add public comments to any result item

?    The opportunity to see site previews and annotate text, images, links and forms directly into the results

?    The ability to try any search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine with a single click

?    The ability to customize the background on the header for a more themed result for any search

?    The opportunity to view the change history showing all the social actions for any page

?    Click here (http://search.wikia.com/help/overview.html) for a short video showing several of these new features in action

"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, Wikia, Inc. "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."

Other new features include revamped social profile pages, which now include an ?activity? feed showing search result changes, revamped messaging including the ability to ?nudge? friends and overall style improvements. The project also has a new index, built from community input, that includes a whitelist directed master index and has the Grub community crawler input included.

The Wikia Search project is built using and available as open source and all content is under an open license. The Internet Systems Consortium (http://www.isc.org/) (ISC), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the universal connected self-organizing Internet, continues to host the building and serving of the index with an open application programming interface (API).

To keep up with the latest developments around open source search or to volunteer, please visit the community wiki at: http://search.wikia.com .

About Wikia, Inc.

Since Wikia?s launch in November 2004, more than 1 million articles on 6,000 topics have been created and edited by over 350,000 registered users in 70 languages and attracts over 18mm unique visitors a month.

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales. Please note, however, that Wikia is an independently operated company and therefore Wikia and all of Wikia?s subsequent projects, including the Wikia Search project, are in no way related to Wikipedia.org or The Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Press Contact:

Trevor Jonas

Bite Communications for Wikia

415-365-0360

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