Wikia lets companies add their widgets as search results

October 7, 2008 | Chris Morrison | Comments |
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If you want the most useful information possible to appear in response to a search, why not allow information portals like the community news aggregator Digg and travel site Kayak add it themselves? Search Wikia is opening itself up to allow companies to do just that, by adding their own widget to search results.

Wikia was started by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales in 2006 to try to take monetary advantage of the user contributions that drove the non-profit online encyclopedia to fame. The answer to the question above is “Because you can’t trust other companies with your service,” but Wales is betting on his users to weed out the bad widgets and support the helpful ones.

The company is launching with 14 partners, including the two above and others like AccuWeather, music site Amie Street, job listing site Indeed, micro-messaging service Twitter and local listings portal Yelp. Each company will have its own scheme for building a helpful widget.

Kayak, for example, will respond to searches like “SFO to JFK” by providing a search box showing travel fares from itself and other travel sites. And Yelp’s widget will be able to return a result for “pizza near Sears Tower” with listings for pizza joints near the historic tower in Chicago, according to Wales, by using geolocation data.

“I think everyone will do this in the future,” says Wales of the widgets. It’s true that other engines, including Google, already do some similar things, although often from their own internal services. Google, for example, uses Google Maps as a widget within its own search results. But Wikia’s approach allows for more innovation, vetted by users.

Whether enough users exist to drive the process and prevent gaming, is questionable. Wikia is still in its very early growth stages; Wales says it only recently broke 100,000 searches in a single day. The total market sees around 40 million search requests daily, according to comScore’s statistics, excluding certain kinds of searches.

Wikia also recently added more editing features for users and the widget framework, which users can also use. The company is working on a back-end overhaul to improve the automated portion of its technology.

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About the Author, Chris Morrison

Chris Morrison writes about cleantech and environmental issues for VentureBeat, with occasional forays into gaming and semantic technology. He got his start writing about tech for Business 2.0 magazine, but quickly realized new media was the ticket when that institution closed its doors in 2007. Chris has also covered public equities and regulatory issues. He originally hails from southern Virginia, graduated from Evergreen State College in Washington, and now lives in San Francisco.

  • I like the way you described it here: "Wikia was started by Wikipedia [CO-]founder Jimmy Wales in 2006 to try to take monetary advantage of the user contributions ..."

    You may enjoy a recent _Guardian_ column I wrote on Wikipedia's history, and advertising:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/25/wikipedia.internet

    Relevant quote: "It's informative to observe how long [Jimmy] Wales has been pursuing a strategy of selling advertising around other people's work."
  • The controversy over Wales' involvement in Wikipedia is pretty well known (at least in our audience) and I prefer not to rehash it in every single article about Wikia, which one might note is a for-profit company that's pretty straightforward about its "strategy of selling advertising around other people's work."

    I do find the raw hatred Wales has inspired in a number of people pretty impressive. If only that could be monetized..

    Point on the CO-founder note, I will correct that.
  • To be clear, I was complimenting your description of Wikia. As I've written, I regard the business press as important, because they are (socially) allowed to make observations which are considered rude and improper in other punditry contexts. So I've been trying to bring some of the financial analysis which is permitted in the business press to other areas. When I make the observation that venture capitalists want money back, preferably large returns on their investment, you may consider that the most elementary baby-simple statement, but elsewhere it's regarded as a radical and almost insulting statement.

    Many people believe Wales has treated them extremely poorly, either in his role as entrepreneur or as a person. I suggest to you that while of course these situations are not uncommon, there is an extra dose of salt-in-the-wound from, let's say, his presentation of himself.
  • Gotcha, and I misread your comment. Good point on press roles, not to mention perspective.
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