At last, Search Wikia has been released, I’ve had a very quick look at this. I like the very simple look and feel on both the home and results pages.

Results are interesting.

A search of TRIP Database finds TRIP first result.

Prostate cancer returns reasonable results.

prostate cancer screening cochrane systematic review (I’m looking for the Cochrane SR on the topic) did not find the anything close (such as the record on the cochrane.org site).

evidence based medicine pretty poor.

prrostate returned no results and there was no spelling correction offered.

For each search term there is the ability to write a mini article about a particular search term – I guess for introductions to the topic. Also, there is the ability to discuss these results which brings up a wiki-style editor. I imagine that’s the area where you state that ‘this result is bad, why not….’

As the site says “Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.“

I’m intrigued; it’s way too early to see if this will develop into a rival to Google (or even a Google-killer). But in the forthcoming weeks/months I’ll return to see how the above searches improve.