Computer Solution

You’ve heard of Wikipedia, right? If so, you may know that in late 2004, the founder of Wikipedia came up with something new called Wikia, which allows you to create your own wiki (a Web site that anyone can edit). Well, even more than that, Wikia just released Wikia Search, which is a wiki search engine. It’s sort of like Google, but it gives you more control over your results. If you’d like to learn more about it, head on over to http://search.wikia.com and let’s get started!

If you want to start contributing to Wikia Search, it’s a good idea to sign up first. In the top right hand corner, click on the Sign Up link.

Next, under the Sign Into Your Account section, click on Sign Up once more.

You’ll then be given a form to fill out. You’ll need to enter in your name, e-mail address, desired username, desired password, your date of birth, your gender and you’ll need to solve the CAPTCHA test.

Once you’ve hit the Submit button, you’ll be taken to a page where you can look for your e-mail contacts on Wikia Search. I didn’t do this part, so if you’d like to skip it as well, just click on the Wikia Search logo in the top left.

Now, here’s what you can do once you’ve signed up!

Delete Results

Let’s use the search term “WorldStart” as an example. Unfortunately, since Wikia Search is still developing, you’re going to see some pretty odd results until someone goes in and edits them. You can also search any other search engine on the Web from Wikia Search. It’s very convenient! Here’s the first result for WorldStart:

Obviously, that shouldn’t be there, so go ahead and click on the Delete link. Clicking that deletes the link from the search results. Your change will show up on the right hand side of the page under Result History. See how there’s also an RSS logo there? Well, that means the result history is also an RSS feed. So, if you want to patrol a certain search term for “vandalism,” you can just add it to your RSS reader and easily monitor your results!

Add Results

The top search result for WorldStart is a direct link to the WorldStart store. That’s great, but it’s probably better to have the actual homepage at the top of the list. So, in the upper right hand corner, click on the text box that says “Add to this result.”

To add to the search result for WorldStart, you just need to put http://www.worldstart.com into the text box and hit the Add button. Now, the search result looks like this:

That looks great, but wouldn’t it be even better to add some description to it as well? For example, Google’s description of http://www.worldstart.com looks like this:

Here’s your first editing project! Click on the Edit button and type in the correct information.

That’s all there is to it. Now, Wikipedia’s founder seems to think Wikia Search will rival the Google and Yahoo! search engines. What do you think?!