Wikia search engine closes

Fri 3 April 2009 09:45, Bas van den Beld

And there goes another 'Google killer'. It was supposed to be the user generated search engine which would provide us with transparency and human touch. But Wikia closes.

The user suggested search results never really got popular though. It couldn't live up to the reputation it had gotten from its owner, Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales.

Wales says that the economy is one of the reasons the search engine is stopping. He wants to be profitable and with the usage numbers of Wikia that doesn't seem to be possible. The two employees Wales has therefore will be losing their jobs.

Except for this week the search engine never really had any impressive numbers to show with about 4.000 contributions average and over 11,000,000 queries in total.

The search engine will now only be remembered for the courage it had to make the first step in user generated search results. I'm sure in the future we will be seeing more of this kind of search (Google already let's you adjust your own results when logged in for example) but Wikia just seemes to be too early.

Wikia had a total of over 14 million dollars of funding 10 million of which came from Amazon. It turned out not to be enough.

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