User blog comment:Ralok/The Search Changes/@comment-4674838-20120512054422/@comment-13301-20120512113923

Wait. You are... comparing a web search engine and a local website search to see what gets more traffic? Sorry, but that's a fallacy. You can't compare both since they have a very different scope.

A wiki has a very scoped content. If you want to make a search, most of the time you do a search of a character name, an object, a location, or whatever related to the topic of the wiki, and if the wiki is well constructed a page with that exact title will exist, with all the information you want.

I feel very incoherent that Wikia is hiding lots of content from the UI (links to history, recentchanges, diffs, talk pages, even licensing information), claiming it scares newbies, and on the other hand it wants to suppress (for anons, and by default for other users) a core feature that direct your search to the exact page you want, and instead of that present the user with a list of lots of search results pages (and a header of About 800 results for &lt;your search term&gt;). How could that user feel when (s)he get that page? According to the way Wikia thinks, that user would probably feel overwhelmed about so many pages and would miss that the exact page (s)he want to reach is the first one, so (s)he would quit from the wiki and going to another site. Also, with flashing ads around the search results (or even inside) it would be even more difficult to notice the right page to go, incrementing the chance that the reader leaves the site.

The standard way of searching already gives you the search results page when a page with that name doesn't exist, so there's no problem if the user misspelled something. Even the standard search (not on Wikia) gives you a link to create a page when it doesn't exist, which is a good way to motivate users to create pages that doesn't exist yet and join the wiki. The current system doesn't provide that, so newbies quit from the wiki instead of having interest to create the page (which may not know (s)he even can create a page!). Even if that makes some users to create stub pages or nonsense, it gives the community an "alert" of what pages are demanded for creation, or a redirect is needed on that page. Wikia's system fails for that.

While it's good that wikia will provide a preference option to get the old behavior, it doesn't work for anonymous users.

Wikia needs to improve the backend search system, not the frontend. It was completely functional before the changes.