Wikia Search Closes It's Doors

bye-bye

[kaz]

Jimmy Wales announced the end of Wikia Search today

[blog.jimmywales.com...]

we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties
...
In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely.

I hardly think the economy is the issue, if you produce a better search people will still come to it regardless of the economy. bye-bye

[JS_Harris]

I haven't ever received a single visitor from Wikia Search, I concur, the economy was not the problem.

[bwnbwn]

I didn't even know it existed and as well have never seen it in my log files so there can't be much of a user base.

[taasinge]

They have a search engine?

[rich_b]

Never heard of it. Maybe it never existed and this is a publicity stunt - then miraculously they'll launch it. Er, I mean save it from oblivion.

[wheel]

They have a search engine?

Lol. It's quotes like this that make me wish we had sig lines here.

[Makaveli2007]

Werent they talking about being the next google killer and all? Nothing wrong with a little cockiness and trash talk, but if you go out like this, it's plain ridiculous. that's like a 5th grader who hasnt played basketball before c hallenging MJ in his prime

[Umbra]

That's great news! I trust their Wiki spider will stop hammering at our websites.

[kaz]

that's like a 5th grader who hasnt played basketball before challenging MJ in his prime

kinda like saying something like ... ?

"reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic," said Wales - WebmasterWorld thread [webmasterworld.com]

[Angonasec]

Cuil next?

[jmccormac]

It was a pity that it failed. It really had some good people involved and they seemed to be serious about the backend and software. However all search engines depend on the quality of their search index for their success. I took a look at the URLs in Wikia Search's last database dump and the quality was very poor. This is the area, search index quality, that had they concentrated on it would have made a difference. Real search professionals are far rarer than the enthusiastic amateurs that Wikipedia relies upon for its continued success.

Regards...jmcc

[subhankar ray]

Was it based on Nutch crawler and Lucene indexing?
My hats off to Wales for Wikipedia though..