This sounds like SUCH a bad idea

[unixronin]

This morning, Wikia is rolling out cool features on the controversial Wikia Search engine.

Starting today, if you do a search on the engine and don't like the results, you'll be able to change them.  Your changes will apply not just for yourself, but rather for everybody.

This sounds like SUCH a bad idea.  Bad enough that people try to manipulate Google's PageRank engine (and that Google deprecates search results for sites it thinks are trying to do so).  But on Wikia, it goes far beyond that:

If you think a result on a search result page is too low or too high in the listings, you can influence its position by rating it.  You can delete entries entirely or hand-write new ones.  You can also rewrite the text of a search result, including adding code to the result (to insert, perhaps, a site-specific search, like Google's search-within-search).

Or perhaps to insert malware into search results, or to redirect search results for a competitor's site to your own, or ...

This sounds like complete anarchy.  Whoever can edit fastest, wins.  What's the point of a search engine when you don't know from one day to the next whether you can trust its results at all?  It's the next best thing to a ouija board.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/crossfire_/]

Good lord.

So I went to Wikia Search and clicked on the Recent Changes link at the top. This gives you a list of the changes that have just been done to the search engine. I noticed that there was someone dicking around with the search results for Jimmy Wales. Now, I've never heard of this guy, but apparently someone doesn't care much for him because they deleted the result pointing to the guy's Wikipedia entry, then forged a link to the Wikipedia entry for Syphilis, and then have been giving it 5 stars.

And that was just the first thing I saw.

Yeah. Won't be using THAT search engine any time in the near future.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

Maybe if we all go do this to Wikia Search results FOR "Wikia Search", then they'll get the idea....

[novel-tharkun.livejournal.com]

No, no. We have to get the attention of people with moxy & muscle. Let's point all religious saints, events, etc to discussions of mythology or devil-worship.

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

I think a slashdot style system could work well but IMHO people should be forced to do moderation of edits/ratings and meta-moderation of moderations or suffer a karma penalty for lack of public service. High score editors/raters should be harder to reverse than lower rated editors/raters though there would of course there would be those with god mode to screw things up or unscrew it.

It can be abused but it's all I can think of in five minutes. ;)