Everybody seems to be slating Wikia Search from day one. How anybody can expect a small team to build a serious Google competitor in less than a year is beyond me. If Microsoft and Yahoo couldn’t do it in the last few years why should Wikia be able to do it in a few months?

The best part about Wikia is that you can create a profile and tag yourself as being interested in certain searches, Matt Cutts tagged himself as being interested in viagra (presumably for spam reasons……..) and I tagged myself as being interested in blogstorm so whenever you search for blogstorm it brings up my photo. That doesn’t happen with Google.

One of the worst features of Wikia is when you search for commercial terms from the UK. Searches such as “mobile phones” return awful results but that is also the case for Ask, Yahoo and MSN sometimes as well. Google is the only search engine to have got geotargeting right and that’s why they have an 80% market share over here.

The Wikia model of whitelisting websites could work very well, imagine if they took every site linked from Wikipedia, every site that has Google Sitelinks and every site that has been on Digg twice. That would remove spam in an instant.