Today the
Wikia Search team announced something that dramatically changed how easy it is to help build a better search engine. It is a new
Firefox toolbar that lets you add sites and metadata about them to the Wikia Search index in a few clicks, without ever leaving the page. You can also add search results from Google or Yahoo directly to Wikia Search.
Now, if only they could figure out a way to better handle the diversity of languages spoken in the web, that would be great. It bothers me a little how much German gets in my way when doing Wikia Search stuff, and also I'd like to add more Portuguese content, so this area has lots of room for improvement. As far as I know Google is the only search engine that tries to address language issues in search results, but I don't like how they do it either, because you can't choose multiple languages when searching.
I'd say let's wait and see, but actively shaping it is much more fun than waiting ;)