Searching the web is harder than it looks and more political than it seems. Those are some of the lessons being learned from the alpha launch of Wikia Search (alpha.search.wikia.com), a so-called social search engine. Although by no means the first attempt at heavily involving humans in ordering search results (some notable examples are ChaCha.com and Mahalo.com), it has generated the most publicity.

But its much-hyped debut received savage criticism from many quarters. A write-up at TechCrunch.com called it "one of the biggest disappointments I've had the displeasure of reviewing" (tinyurl.com/yw4zko), while an evaluation at SearchEngineLand.com said it's "another crappy search service that may, potentially, if all goes well, eventually turn into something useful".

Wikia is a startup company backed by $14m (£7m) of venture capital, formed by several high-level people involved with Wikipedia, notably co-founder Jimmy Wales. Although the for-profit Wikia and nonprofit Wikipedia have no significant financial connection, the extraordinary publicity garnered by Wikipedia works to give Wikia a tremendous marketing boost.

Wikia's business is based around the commercial exploitation of, politely, "community", and less politely, the unpaid labour of digital sharecroppers. In the same way Wikipedia is in part built by harnessing popular envy and resentment against the status of academics, Wikia's search project is trying to draw on the fear and doubt stemming from the dominance of Google.

The overall dynamics are much more complex than the superficial idea of Wikia Search being a Google killer. At a deeper level, there's a powerful quasi-populist appeal in presenting a commercial undertaking as a rebellion against authority or an anti-monopolist effort. Wikia has managed to shift many search engine expenses on to others by using arguments of public interest in a "transparent" search system. These ideas have motivated partnership with a nonprofit organisation, the Internet Software Consortium, to have ISC support some of the infrastructure for a search engine.

While in theory that particular infrastructure will be open and available to all, it's safe to say that framing search as a public good has been good for Wikia's bottom line. It's not quite the case that, as a wag might jest, a charity has made a substantial donation to a venture capital-backed startup. Moreover, there's an intrinsic tension between the needs of a corporation, and attempts to have an open process. For example, several months ago Wikia made much of acquiring a distributed Web crawler named Grub from LookSmart. The press release (tinyurl.com/2urdbx) stated: "By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent."

But financial disclosures that LookSmart was required to file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission revealed: "The URL for Grub and certain source code were sold for $50,000" (although in 2003, LookSmart had bought Grub for a "total consideration of $1.3m, consisting of $0.6m cash payment ... [and] stock valued at $0.7m"). This small price may not have given the full picture, as at the same time Wikia and LookSmart also entered into an arrangement over advertising sales.

But even considering that other factors might have been involved, the very low valuation indicated that it was certainly not much in terms of competitive search technology. It added credence to a viewpoint expressed by some technical experts that Grub was plagued with problems. The imperatives of marketing led Wikia to talk up the program's quality, while the relevant open and transparent information came only as a result of a government mandate. The sociopolitical role of search engines will generate more discussion in the future. But we should guard against some of the less savoury politics it can entail, such as the commodification of discontent and attempts at corporate co-option.