Remember all the talk about the founder of Wikipedia looking to build a human-powered search engine which took place some time last year? Well, looks like an alpha version of the search engine has been released and it is called wikia search.

Although in the About page it was mentioned that 'What you see here is our first alpha release. We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.', Wikia has been receiving some honest but harsh reviews since it went live. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch openly admitted that he is completely let down by the product.

Michael's review at Techcrunch created quite a bit of buzz and there are some interesting debates going on about the whole thing. Some say the approach was to build it quick and release it often (which, by the way, is also one of the tips I learned from Web Directions South 2007), while others say given all the hype and wait that it has caused, the release should have been better.

My opinion? I did a few searches and while I can't say I am happy with the search results that I was returned nor was I impressed with the usability, I think given time, and right amount of effort from its community, wikia search will eventually perform to its full potential.

[tags]search, search engine, wikia, reviews, web 2.0, human-powered[/tags]