The alpha launch of Wikia search engine has met with criticism from early users, but Wikia founder, Jimmy Wales, argues that he is “building something different”, adding that this takes time and community involvement.

The idea of the new Wikia search engine, according to its creator, is to introduce transparency into the search engine process. Rather than results being computer generated, they will be ranked according to relevance given to them by the web community.

Users will rate search results using open-source software and influence the search process through editing a wiki section that appears at the top of the results page. Wikia plans to store IP addresses that will work as user trails to guard against the search engine being targeted by spammers.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called the product “an inexcusable waste of time” and said “Wikia search would be a disappointment even without the massive hype we’ve had to endure.”

Wales has himself admitted the, “search sucks” in comments relating to the review and Wikia has posted in bold on its own “about page” that “we are aware that the quality of the search results is low” and gives the reason of a lack of user feedback data.

Wales argues on TechCrunch the site will take time to function properly: “When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page ‘Wikipedia the free encyclopedia’. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia; it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!”

Wikia should not continue being compared to Google because “they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it,” Wales said, adding that “Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine; they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea.”

However, many reviewers have queried how the quality of the search engine will improve when it relies on user participation to work and the alpha holds a limited amount of the human functionality of which Wales had promised.

“I think we all have a right to be disappointed by the lack of ability to contribute to the search engine yet,” said one commenter in response to Arrington’s review. “That’s a feature I would have expected to be present even in alpha state, since the entire concept of the engine is to be manipulated and edited by the community,” he added.

But discussing the quality of the results, Wikia said, “we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.”

However, the evidence suggests the site has been launched too soon, even in its alpha stage. For example difficulties have been experienced when trying to access the “contact us” link and the “terms of use”. Also when using Internet Explorer, IT Week Labs had trouble signing into Wikia and found it was only possible when using a Firefox browser.

Compared to Google, obvious limitations to the sites functioning include the search results return takes longer, there is no obvious way to limit results to a specific area, and Wikia does not contain functionality to allow users to skip ahead in the result return, for example to number 50, if need be. Wikia only allows users to skip ahead to the next batch.

Although Wikia also plans to tie information on users and their friends into the search results, this relies on users slowing down to share their preferences and give judgment. Since a whole element of search is to find answers to topics fast, this functionality might prove difficult to enhance.

IT Week Labs also found in random search results test that the returns contained many useless foreign language results.