Scouring the internet this week for vaguely interesting websites (no, not that sort of ‘interesting’) I came across a couple of gems that can only be described as little bits of online wheat amongst the copious amounts of web chaff.

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There are many reasons why we at Republic do what we do. One of them is to help brands create and engage online communities. We do that by giving them (the brands) things to talk about that they (the online communities) find interesting and engaging. Using our finely honed editorial craft and judgment, we lay down an editorial schedule designed to bring the two closer together. An increasingly important part of what we do, is to ensure the stuff we write is both easily findable (high up on Google search results pages) and relevant (so someone will actually be searching for it in the first place).

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Wikipedia will no doubt be happy to hear of the death of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia, but it’s not all been good news for Jimmy Wales this week. Wikia has quietly pulled the plug on Wikia Search, its attempt at putting social media into search.

For those who didn’t know, Wikia Search was an attempt to bring Wikipedia’s user contribution model to a search engine. Results could be rated, inserted and edited: a nice idea, but not popular: it was getting just 10,000 unique users per month. So slightly less than Google, then.

Wales said Wikia Search was shuttered due to the economy, but I suspect the problem lies deeper than that. The difference between Wikia Search and any big social network is that search is simply about getting to the page you need, fast, and you’re not going to beat Google for speed. But you’re on Facebook because you want to be there: anywhere that your friends take you from there with Publisher links is a bonus.

A social media enabled search presents all sorts of problems: not least that self-editing could be even more abused. Is there a way to offer speed and convenience combined with the peer review nature of search? Google’s SearchWiki is halfway there, letting you rank your own results, but it’s not shared. We’re not sure there’s a better solution yet but we’ll be using it when we find it.