by Kevin Heisler

Debbie Richman posted two social search engine analyses reviews of Wikia Search that didn’t bash Wales and his Build-A Bare Engine Workshop.

VentureBeat’s Saumil Mehta (product manager, vertical search engine competitor) has the most thorough user review of Wikia Search here that makes others superfluous. Bloggers, If you haven’t reviewed the features yet, wait until the next release.

We say “Wikia Search”, Saumil says “Search Wikia.” Should Wikia Search call the whole thing off?

Jimmy Wales weighed in at TechCrunch where a great debate is brewing. So we’ll give Jimmy’s comments a wider audience here.

After the jump, Eli Feldblum will explain why SEOs (and corporations using SEOs) could make Wikia Search grow exponentially — thru better search results — but may stay on the sidelines, along with hundreds of millions of searchers.

Wikia Search will likely take the advice of Ask exec and former Search Engine Watcher Gary Price: in short, watch out for “manipulation.” (by SEOs? by webmasters of the world? We’ll look for more from Gary since Wikia Search will be a (4th Place) Ask.com Killer before it ever gives Google the Sweeney Todd treatment.

In TechCrunch, Jimmy Wales said: “(Wikia Search) is a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine … So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it. We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.”

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