My idea of what a search engine should be is clearly quite different to Jimmy Wales', but that doesn't mean I think Wikia has no place on the web- far from it. Calling Wikia a search engine is a little ambiguous for my taste. Sure, it provides search results, but they're collated in a markedly different way than the current methods used by Yahoo!, MSN Google etc. That difference is why I'm not sure it really qualifies as a search engine any more.

For a good discussion of Wikia have a look at this cnet article, and for the most recent changes look here.

As I'm a little vain I used Wikia to search myself, and see what those changes are like. The first thing that brought a smile to my face was the amount of editing you can do. To shunt a result up or down the SERP you can rate it- but that's lame compared with the "delete" option- editing snippets is a pretty cool feature too.

Anyway, here's how it hangs together...

Search result:



Add another search result for that search term:



Added search result:

Editing snippet information



Adding related search terms: