Wikia Gives Up on Wikia Search….For Now?

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia, has announced this week that they will be ceasing work on their Wikia Search project for the forseeable future as the current economic conditions force them to “do what we need to do to get to profitability”.

The Wikia Search project was launched in January 2008 and Wales claims it was always going to be a “long term project”.  The search engine was based on the principles of user generation and intervention to produce more accurate and user friendly search results through community voting and moderation.  But Wales has been forced to concede that the end goal is too far in the future to justify any more work whilst times are hard, and the business needs to focus its efforts on some of its more tactical projects that have a better chance of turning a profit.

This is disappointing for me as a few years ago I used to give presentations which suggested Wikia could be the underdog contender to the search engine crown.  But since Google launched its own wiki search project, and as Wikia failed to produce anything tangible, the chances of this coming to fruition were always limited.  Wales claims he will return to the project in the future, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last we hear of Wikia search.