But Wales told me Search Monkey is basic compared with WISE,
allowing users to customize the look of a search result. So, Search
Monkey will return the same results, only prettier or more detailed.
Wales said:
"What we're doing is allowing for the creation of new search
results. We want to see thousands of these [WISEApps], where for all
kinds of searches you can get results that humans have actually
reviewed, thought about, discussed and debated what the right keywords
are that will return a group of results. That's really different from
Search Monkey, which is just a cosmetic thing on top of traditional
algorithmic search."
Wales and Wikia approached several businesses with the WISE proposition and scored some key hits.
The Digg WISEApp provides recent front page Digg stories directly
within the Wikia Search results page. This is the big fish for Wikia;
Digg users currently vote on more than 16,000 submissions each day, and
the site has a beefy user base of 32 million.
The Twitter WISEApp provides recent tweets for related queries. The
Creative Commons WISEApp provides images for relevant queries. Other
WISEApp creators include AccuWeather.com, Yelp, Kayak.com, Last.fm and
Thomson Reuters.
Wales Discusses Search Engine Wars, click here
Since Wales happened to liken WISE to Facebook, I asked him if Wikia
approached Facebook to have the social network create a WISEApp. He
said no, but didn't rule out the possibility.
Developers interested in creating a WISEApp can access the Wikia
sandbox to test their app and submit them to Wikia, which will look
them over before publishing them online.
Wales doesn't harbor delusions of grandeur to think that WISE will help propel the open-source Wikia Search project into Google or Yahoo
territory for core search relevancy. But if WISE can improve Wikia's
search relevancy, then it could be a viable alternative for folks tired
or wary of searching Google.
Wikia launched an alpha version last January that was shredded by testers, but in June the company improved the search capabilities and allowed users to begin editing the site en masse.
Wikia joins Cuil, Powerset, Hakia, Mahalo and several other second-tier
search vendors trying to carve their own shares of the market.
Search Engines 
