Jimmy Wales’ brainchild Wikia (a search engine modelled after the wikipedia concept of a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way) went live last week, and the search results it offers up absolutely, positively suck. The reason that I know this (beyond a few experiments searching for things like ‘sports’ and getting a top hit of something like a box score for an old lacrosse game in a Minnesota high school, that’s already been removed) is that I went to the About Us page, and the third sentence reads:

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.

You can also find a whole lot of bad reviews in places like TechCrunch, where Michael Arrington called it “one of the biggest disappointments  I’ve ever had the displeasure of viewing.” Ouch.

Now if you were in (say) the soap business, and the third sentence you used to describe yourself was “the quality of our soap is low”, and the reviewers were noting it’s the worst soap ever, you might not be in the soap business for much longer. Wikia, of course, is hoping to be different – given that the whole value proposition is search results generated by user feedback, it’s not exactly surprising the site’s not so good when it opens because… wait for it… they don’t have any user feedback yet.

In turn, we are in the early stages of a very, very interesting wikinomics experiment. Can a community come together to create a living, breathing search engine that rivals the all-power Google algorithm? Can the Wikipedia model, which relies on annual donations upwards of $1 million a year to keep going, be successfully replicated in a for-profit enterprise? Can, at minimum, it become something that’s borderline usable?

Various writers (like this one) have noted even Jimmy Wales has said it might flop, but that the hope is it will return results as good as other search engines within a few years. The question, however, is why people would want to put their time into it – what’s the incentive to click on and improve terrible search results?

Wikipedia had the “open knowledge to share with the world” angle which galvanized people, but Wikia doesn’t have anything nearly as inspiring. Wikipedia contributors can directly see their contribution – with Wikia it’s a little more off in the more distant future, maybe, and you might have helped, we think. And while there appear to be a few tools set up to enable a “community”, I’d be hard pressed to find someone right now willing to go to the trouble of engaging in it. Might a facebook app have been better here?

I don’t know – but I do know I signed into Wikia to give it a test run, had a similar reaction to what Mr. Arrington said, and upon checking back in today it sure doesn’t seem too many other people are getting into it either. If I had to bet right now, I’d bet that Wikia isn’t going to go well – but not because the core idea is bad.

My belief is that it’s just a little too late in the ball game to be starting this thing from scratch, and the opportunity lies in integrating the core concept with (say) a social networking platform as part of a broader application development. I also once thought there was an opportunity for Yahoo! to head down a road like this (and push back against Google) by leveraging Del.ic.ous and Flickr technology within their search capabilities. In fact, I think there’s a variety of different ways the Wikia search approach could augment current offerings and be brought to market, but they all involve a bigger collaboration than what we see here.