It was eleven months ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first mentioned his vision for a people-powered search engine that would eventually launch under his for profit startup, Wikia. Not much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search is here. But the promise has been for Wikia Search to launch this year, and it appears to be on track. Yesterday Matthew Buckland reported that Wales showed “some of the first screen shots” of the new project (the first, as far as I know). The main screen shot is a profile page for a user (see above) that looks surprisingly like a Facebook profile. It was taken by Nic Haralambous. The Man v. Machine debate as it applies to search is about to begin. By this time next year we should have lots of data on the performance of Wikia Search, as well as the new startup Mahalo which is also in this space. Until then, we can spend our time speculating and, I guess, continuing to live with Google for our search needs. CrunchBase Information Wikia Mahalo Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Seattle-based Wetpaint, which launched in June 2006, is a hosted wiki site that focuses on great looking sites and making the user interface as easy as possible. A number of wikis have popped up around popular pop culture stuff, as well as more private sites. Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views – they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki. This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks. CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well – wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views. Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply. The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors): CrunchBase Information Wetpaint Tangler Meetro Grouply Wikia pbwiki Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Wikinvest has closed a $2.5 million series A led by DCM and including angels. Wikinvest is just as the name suggests, a wiki for investors. Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia. Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data. They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example). All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization. Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts. → Read More
Caring.com, a website community about elderly care, just announced a $6 million Series A round of financing from DCM and Split Rock Partners. It’s yet another one of the subject-specific knowledge communities to pop up over the last year. The site, as you can guess, is about caring for your parents in their “Golden Years”. It provides articles about dealing with your parent’s healthcare, financial, legal, housing, and life issues written by professionals or other users. It seems like a more smartly age-related service than Eons social network for the over 50. Details on the site are sparse, as the site is only now opening its beta. However, it will likely have the usual forum features and social networking profiles. The team shouldn’t have too much trouble setting up the site since the founders, Jim Scott and Steve Fram spent eight years at BabyCenter, another community site targeting raising children. Sites like Caring.com seem to have a simple formula, find an underserved vertical, put up a community driven content management system, get some editors, and own the Google search results. Most of these sites are taking on specific verticals, but Wikia is spreading horizontally, using mediawiki as the CMS. CrunchBase Information Caring.com Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
I love Wikia – CEO Gil Penchina, a former eBay executive, says he works harder than anyone in Silicon Valley at building his startup. I routinely point out to him that his startup doesn’t actually do anything – their wiki software is based on the open source MediaWiki project, Google, Looksmart and FM Publishing handle all the revenue via ad sales, and their users create every drop of content on the site. All he has to do is make sure the lights stay on (to be fair, Wikia has made substantial contributions to MediaWiki). Anyway, back to the news: Wikia is launching Wikia Gaming tonight, a collection of video game focused wikis. The sites contain over 250,000 articles on games already, on all major platforms. The World of Warcraft site is the largest single wiki, with 43,000 articles. Wikia, which has raised $14 million from Bessemer and Amazon, claims a quarter billion monthly page views. 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages. → Read More
Wikia, a for profit wiki site created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, acquired ArmchairGM for $2 million last year and got into the sports fan business. The site has been slowly rolling out new features. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina described it to me as “Wiki 2.0″ – because it combines the best features of open source wiki software with social networking features like adding friends, building a profile, meeting new people, create groups, etc. ArmchairGM also allows users to add “foes” in addition to friends, since a lot of sports rivalries are generated on the site. The site also has a unique user generated virtual gift product. Unlike other social networks, users create the gifts themselves by uploading images. Other users can then use those gifts, too, and some become quite popular. Wikis and social networks don’t exactly mix well. Parts of the network, like user profiles, need to be locked down so that only the owner can edit them. Other parts of the site remain wide open and allow anyone to edit. And its growing, fairly rapidly. ArmchairGM alone is now at 1 million monthly page views. Wikia has also rolled out the ArmchairGM software for ten other verticals not included in that page view count – see, for example, Foodie, Gaming, and Politics. The company recently brought in the NFL as a site-wide sponsor. Parent company Wikia continues to grow rapidly, says Penchina. They had 250 million page views in August. → Read More
Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever. (via Graywolf) → Read More
Wikia has acquired the distributed web crawling engine Grub from Looksmart. Grub utlizes spare computing cycles on users’ computers to index the web, a similar concept to that used by SETI@home in the search for extraterrestrial life. Grub originally started in 2000 and was purchased in 2003 by LookSmart. Grub was shut in 2005 following some minor controversy over the closed source code and the failure to comply with Robots.txt blocking requests. Wikia will open source the Grub code “as soon as possible” and use the data from Grub to feed the Search Wikia Project. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. (via R/WW) → Read More
There was a lot of controversy recently when Wikipedia announced that all outbound links from the online encyclopedia would include the nofollow tag. The nofollow tag on a link is said to prevent link spamming since some search engines (Google among them) do not count links containing the tag towards any weighing of the destination page. What this means is that a link from Wikipedia will no longer boost the position of a page in search results, the intention being that this will deter spammers from sneaking links onto Wikipedia. In Febuary of 2005 the Wikipedia community voted in favor (by a vote of 61% to 39%) of removing the nofollow tags, but this outcome was overruled by Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, earlier this year. It seems that while the nofollow tag is added to the standard outbound links, it isn’t applied to inter-wiki links, including links to Wikia, Wikipedia’s for-profit spin off. For example, on the Wikipedia page for Wikia there are a number of links to Wikia pages which do not contain the nofollow tag: <a href="/wiki/Wookieepedia" title="Wookieepedia">Wookieepedia</a> <small>(<a href="http://www.wikia.com/wiki/c:Starwars:Main_Page" class="extiw" title="wikiasite:Starwars:Main_Page">home</a>)</small> The result: wikis included on the white list are granted outbound links that do not contain the “nofollow” tag. These sites benefit directly by receiving higher search engine placements, which is equivalent to additional traffic and authority. Many direct competitors to Wikia, such as Wetpaint, are not included in the white list as of today. The links to Wikia that don’t have the nofollow tag are created using a special Wikipedia tag wikiasite:. The tag for linking to Wikia pages isn’t mentioned in the help pages for Wikipedia, but there are many references to it throughout Wikipedia and the talk pages on various topics. It is a special type of link known as an Interwiki link, which means that you can use special shortcut tags when linking to other Wiki’s (such as Wikia). The question is, why wouldn’t the nofollow policy apply to inter-wiki links? Specifically since there is an apparent conflict of interest with Wikia, something that you would think that the Wikia team would want to avoid. The Wikipedia decision to include nofollow tags was not popular and many have pointed out that nofollow is not as effective in preventing link spam as was expected. Wikipedia now has very few outbound links that are honored by search engines, and all of these → Read More
John Gotts, the entrepreneur who agreed to pay $3 million for the domain name Wiki.com and reportedly told people he was “going to kill Wikipedia” may have thrown in the towel after just a few months. Instead of launching the promised Wiki site with MindTouch software, the Wiki.com site now simply redirects to Wikia, another wiki service affiliated with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. When asked for a comment, Wikia CEO Gil Penchina said only that Wikia does not currently own the domain name, and wouldn’t speculate on whether or not a deal was closed with Gotts. The original deal that Gotts did to acquire the domain required $10,000 monthly payments to the original owner, with the bulk of the payment to be made down the road. Perhaps Wikia is just covering those monthly payments for Gotts, while his lawyer tries to find a way out of the original contract. We’ll see. Update: The Whois information for the domain name is still showing Dynamo, the entity that supposedly sold it to Gotts. → Read More
I was going through CEO Gil Penchina’s Wikia presentation slides at the Le Web conference in Paris last month and noticed something that made me realize they could be a huge site some day. According to the company, Wikia is producing 2.5 million page views per day and growing steadily, and their new article growth rate tracks the early days of Wikipedia, nearly identically. The key slide from Penchina’s presentation is below, comparing growth in unique articles between the two sites, but over different time periods. So Wikia, the for-profit sister site to Wikipedia, is closely tracking the early growth of Wikipedia in terms of new article generation. The obvious conclusion is that what worked for Wikipedia may work for Wikia, too. Certainly the same forces of user generated content and community are in play. It’s harder to compare page views as Wikipedia has apparently not tracked their own page views for years, but Wikia is certainly holding their own at 2.5 million/day. Wikia confirms that they currently have nothing more than a “default” deal with Google for text ads on their site. The big ad networks (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) are all trying lock up long term deals with big partners, usually by offering some sort of revenue guarantee (see Google’s nearly $1 billion deal with MySpace and Microsoft’s deal with Facebook). I wouldn’t be surprised to see each of them begin to pursue Wikia as well, simply as a hedge in the event the site someday grows to even a fraction of Wikipedia’s size. Whichever company locks up Wika over the long term may have a very nice asset down the road. Our earlier coverage of Wikia is here. → Read More
A couple of days ago I posted a screenshot of what I believed to be an early version of the new Wikiasari search engine that Jimmy Wales has been talking about. Our source was good, and I went with it. But Wales is saying that the screenshot has nothing to do with the project, in a comment to that post and also on the Wikiasari page on Wikia (since taken down, but screenshot is here). The Wikiasari page also now gives a bit about the background of the project, and Wikisearch is not mentioned. The project was originally called 3apes. So that leaves us with the Wikisearch screenshot, and I’m trying to figure out what it is. One of the commenters to the original post pointed out that it looks like its part of this project, which includes the Wikia logo on the bottom right. Unless it’s a fake site, that means it’s a Wikia search project, just as Wikiasari is. So if Wikisearch isn’t Wikiasari, what the heck is it? → Read More
Update 12/25/06: Jimmy Wales says this isn’t a Wikiasari screen shot. So what is it? The Times reported earlier today that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is planning to launch a new search engine next year, to be called Wikiasari. He’s clearly aiming for Google. He says: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.” The new company will be the third business division of Wikia, the for profit company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product. Wikia has raised over $4 million in capital, including a recent round by Amazon. Despite the fact that the original article reported that Amazon is involved in the project, Wikia is making it clear on the site that they are not invovled in any way (other than as a shareholder of Wikia). Wikiasari A source tells us that the working name for the project was “WikiSearch” until recently. It’s clear that Wikiasari will be focused on quality first, depth second. Search results will include tag based navigation, the top three results will be wikipedia content, and the remaining results are determined by sites wikipedia considers to be “reputable” because they are external reference links from wikipedia pages. Since all search results will be tied to wikipedia, either directly by linking to wikipedia content or because the sites are linked to from Wikipedia, real people will eventually be determining all search results and rankings within Wikiasari. The search engine will be opensource, and the index will be available under a GFDL. Wikia will operate the master version of the index, but others → Read More
Wikia founder Jimmy Wales believes in “free content for all.” That is why the company launched OpenServing today, a service that is giving away complete Web hosting support to any wiki developer – for free! OpenServing allows anyone to setup and maintain their own collaborative site. Wales told TechCrunch in a phone call today that OpenServing is also intended to go beyond wiki hosting to include free software, free applications, etc. “Basically, anything goes into the model of free culture,” he said. Wikia will provide free software, bandwidth, storage, computing power, and content over the Internet. What’s more, Wikia will give away 100 percent of the ad inventory and revenue to any blogger/Web site owner who wants to sign-up for this. The only stipulation is that developers link to Wikia’s home site in order to drive ad revenue. “The main thing we’re looking for is that they drive traffic back to Wikia but we’re not just thinking of any link back to the home page, but a content-relevant link,” Wales said. “We’re not just asking for an advertisement but a link for articles and things that are relevant on our wikis.” If sites that use OpenService sell ads on their wiki, they are not responsible to share that revenue with Wikia. “Basically they’re free to sell ads on their own site,” Wales explained. “We may at one point offer a service to broker those ads but that’s not our model right now. Our model is basically to say ‘You keep the ad revenue, we’re not really worried about that.’” This announcement solves at least some of the mystery behind Wikia’s purchase of ArmchairGM earlier this month. ArmchairGM is the first freely-licensed software package that OpenServing will offer up. It is also noteworthy that Wikia received an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon just weeks ago, which is likely an important contributing factor to Wikia’s ability to do this. → Read More
Wikia, a for-profit sister site of Wikipedia, received a second round of funding today, all of it coming from Amazon. No word yet on how much Amazon has forked over. Just this week, Wikia announced that they would purchase ArmchairGM, an online sports community, for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock. In March, we reported that the company received $4 million from Bessemer Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, with participation from angel investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and Mitch Kapor. Wikia’s Gil Penchina told GigaOm that the funding and acquisition were “frankly very separate events” that “just happened to come together at the same time” but that the acquisition would have been hard to accomplish without Amazon’s money. → Read More
Wikia will announce the acquisition of ArmchairGM sometime this week, according to a source close to the transaction. The company was bought for $2 million in cash and Wikia stock. We briefly mentioned ArmchairGM in a post about a competitor a couple of months ago. The service, which was created by four guys in New York, is a sort of digg-wiki-sports hybrid thing. Apparently the technology is interesting and compatible with Wikia, and my guess this is partially a hire-by-acquisition type deal. Our previous posts on Wikia are here. → Read More
Wikia has quietly launched semi-private college/university wikis. And they’ve taken a page out of Facebook’s game plan by requiring users to have an approved university email address in order to edit the wiki. The wiki itself, however, is viewable by everyone. The goal is to have better data by keeping out people who aren’t directly affiliated with the university. On the downside, of course, is the fact that people have to find their college email address in order to add content. Facebook clearly provides enough incentive to users to do that. It isn’t clear yet if Wikia will have the same level of success. An example wiki for Stanford is here. Information on creating a semi-private university wiki is here. This is still an experiment, and pre-existing open wiki’s about colleges and universities can be found at students.wikia.com. No word from Wikia on how they will handle having two versions of wikis for each university (one open and one semi-private). Wikia continues to march along and do well after raising $4 million back in March and hiring a former eBay executive, Gil Penchina, to lead the company. Gil says Wikia is now generating 5 million daily page views on a million unique visitors. And their recently launched Travel Guides now have over 1,200 articles in ten languages covering 160 cities, just eight weeks after launch. → Read More
Wikia, a for-profit offshoot of Wikipedia, will announce the launch of a free, editable “worldwide guide of places to go and things to do” on Monday, called World Wikia. The content is very light for now, although for an example of how this might look down the road see their deep content on Roman churches. They will also announce a number of partnerships with commercial publishers to open-source their content and get it up on Wikia. Smartertravel.com and hostelsclub.com are two of the initial partners being announced. Another partner, Vacapedia, will provide access to their vacation rental database. Travel is a big category – if Wikia can pull off a large number of page views they’ll make good money on high CPC contextual ads, their primary revenue source. I also like that they are getting into vacation rentals. Allowing users to post and find properties, leave reviews, etc., all for free, is a good competitive disruption. I imagine demand will quickly develop for a downloadable version of individual cities (or the whole travel section) for mobile devices – something that’s been available for wikipedia for some time. Our previous posts on Wikia are here. The site has over 1,500 “wikia” and 30,000 registered users. → Read More
Gil Penchina, previously eBay’s Vice President and GM of International, is now the CEO of new startup Wikia. Wikia is the for profit sister site of Wikipedia. Where Wikipedia focuses on verifiable facts, Wikia is all about opinions – travel guides, political opinions, whatever. Wikia announced a $4 million venture round in March 2006. I spoke with Gil for a few minutes this morning about his decision to leave, his plans for Wikia and some of his favorite new web startups. Listen to the podcast at TalkCrunch. → Read More
Wikia, formerly called Wikicities, announced a $4 million Series A round today. The financing was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, and had participation from angel investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and Mitch Kapor. David Cowan of Bessemer also wrote about this on his personal blog. Wikia is a for profit venture by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. It hosts topic based wikis on a number of subjects, and anyone can add new ones. Current traffic for Wikia is fairly non-existent, although Jimmy Wale’s wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked sites on the web and I’m sure that the investors are assuming that he’ll be able to drive a similar level of user loyalty. Fighting against that will be the less-compelling subject matter and the fact that this is a for-profit company. I’d love to see an overhaul of the wikipedia and wikia writing interface, however. They have plenty of great examples to borrow from. → Read More
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