You say you've never considered the politics of search engines? Seth Finkelstein, Guardian (Jan 24)
Wikia Search, the supposed social search engine, has not been well received by reviewers judging from this article by Finkelstein.
Key paragraph: "Wikia's business is based around the commercial exploitation of, politely, "community", and less politely, the unpaid labour of digital sharecroppers. In the same way Wikipedia is in part built by harnessing popular envy and resentment against the status of academics, Wikia's search project is trying to draw on the fear and doubt stemming from the dominance of Google."
"Digital sharecroppers" indeed. Wikipedia has been a unexpected successful given that it is the work of largely anonymous people with time on their hands and sometimes expertise. I'm not expecting much from Wikia Search - users will have to do too much work to identify and cut through bias and tampering.
Posted by Gwen at January 24, 2008 08:44 PM