Wikia search

Since I have heard from http://search.wikia.com some time ago, I have checked the site from time to time and had a look at the results. I have tried to get away from google search before, but ask.com or yahoo have just not been very good for me (and yahoo is not really better for your privacy than google is, besides the effect that it is smaller). I had to regoogle things too often, which took too much of my time and was annoying.

But hey is this grub based wikia search good. I know that it has been abandoned by the wikia project recently, since it has too few users for it to be profitable to the wikia project during the economy crisis, but even without the web 2.0 search stuff, like rating commenting and rearranging the search results by the searcher, which is a very good idea imo, it has a quite reasonable result already. It is really rarely that I have to open google now. I almost always find what I need, even if it is not the same that I might find on google, but hey it is still a decentral web and not the grand google register web. And the best thing is you don’t get censorship there. Yes you can even wikia (;-)) for torrents. It is just great to me.

Now besides the service might be shut down soon, what me bothers the most is that they use google adwords, which as far as i know searchs the site with javascript and then fetches the appropriate adds from google, which means, please correct me if I am wrong, that all my search terms/results combinded with my ip are sent to google again…. This is not really great progress to using google directly, but it is a progress and I rather support a FOSS based search with a much clearer (but not as clear as possible) privacy position than google has.

Just try, besides its rough edges, it delivers good results,
whilo

This entry was posted on Sonntag, April 19th, 2009 at 03:22 and is filed under FOSS, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.