Wikia Search

Wikia Search
Death announcement: March 2009

Wikia Search launched in January of 2008 with an oddball idea: let users control the rankings of search results. The hope was to let people constantly vote up more relevant pages, while letting the less-relevant pages move down. This was after a machine algorithm had gone through and come up with the results in the first place.

Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales hoped the system would spread across the Web, as it was made open-source. But it didn't. At its peak the site was drawing some 10,000 users a month, which was markedly lower than some of Wikia's other ongoing projects. To make matters worse, Google had launched its own, quite similar solution called Search Wiki, which it deployed to all its users--thus offering much of the same functionality on a much larger scale.

Wales called it quits on Wikia Search in March. The site now links to Wikia's Answers site.