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02 Apr 2009
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has confirmed that his company intends to shut down its Wikia Search venture.
Wales announced in a blog posting that slow traffic and disappointing returns have led the firm to discontinue the search service.
Designed as a 'user-generated' search engine, Wikia Search allowed users to rate results in an effort to further refine results for future queries. The idea was to create a user-powered and peer-reviewed search engine in a method similar to that of Wikipedia.
However, Wales said that the public had not taken to the engine as warmly as the online encyclopedia, and that he would be discontinuing the project in order to save money amid the harsh economy.
"While I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space, our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped," wrote Wales.
"In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It's something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor or a cheerleader."
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Do you agree?
Relaunch with a memorable short address
Wikia search needed a memorable address to succeed. The choice of http://search.wikia.com was very unfortunate. If 'Wired' can still be confused (http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/wikipedia-found.html) after all this time and is persuaded that Wikia.com is closing down, how likely was it that the majority of ordinary users would be able to find http://search.wikia.com - or remember the address when they were inclined to make a subsequent visit? I hope JW reconsiders - and tries again. It might succeed if he uses something like wsearch.com
Posted by: Roy Green 04 Apr 2009
Been done before
User edited search engines has been tried before in the past and they've all failed. Why? Because unlike a topic or subject on Wikipedia, people don't get that emotional or attached to a url list. Quite why Jimmy Wales didn't see this obvious fact is beyond me. :-)
Posted by: Stuart Halliday 03 Apr 2009
false info
It says that he is the Wikipedia founder, but then says he is the Wikia founder Wikia and Wikipedia are completely different. Wikia is a wiki hosting service, Wikipedia is owned by the Wikimedia foundation, NOT Wikia
Posted by: EC 02 Apr 2009