It's going to be a competitor to Google, they said. It's going to have human element, they said. It will not be as great when it will be released, but it is open source and it will have enormous possibilities to grow, they said. Well, at least they got part of the last one right. It's not in the same zip code area with "great" or even "good", to paraphrase a Yahoo! Messenger audible.

I'm going to save the worst for last, let's begin with the nice features… or feature, to be more precise. The only thing I liked about it is that clicking for the second page of search results will not redirect you to a different page, it just ads the next ten links beneath those that you've already seen. The interface is nice, it's clean and not complicated, with a touch of Google simplicity. Ok, those were it, I guess, besides that it has already offered what Google is slowly trying to introduce, the Profile page that will link allover the place. You sign up for the wikia search and you get the feats of a social network as well, with pictures, friends and the Facebook type of activity stream from them.

On to the not so good part: It does not offer bad spelling suggestions, and the way I see it, it is a major flaw. Any search engine today that does not have it is doomed to go down to the "might have been" projects backwater place of the Internet. The search results are few and many are not concluding. I tried a search for "softpedia" and I got 903 results returned, but none (and I say it again, NONE) pointing out to the homepage.

If you want to test it for yourselves go to alpha.search.wikia.com and register. You don't have to, but if you're in for the social networking side of it…