This sounds like SUCH a bad idea
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.