Wales giving up on Wikia Search

news.cnet.com

24 points·vladocar··11 comments

I'm sad to see the doors close on Wikia Search. I was an intern in the NYC office last summer. The project had a refreshingly open philosophy and was built using FOSS components.

At least the index is still available at http://index.isc.org/

Yeah, I was a big fan of the idea. Clearly Google saw the potential, too.

I almost wish it wasn't a part of Google. I'd like to have two offerings that are totally different-- one that's 100% pagerank and one that trends towards user-ranked. Right now we're kind of losing out on the latter because Google isn't necessarily taking into account the user rankings across accounts.

Doesn't look like the index is downloadable in any useful form. The links just lead to what appears to be a moribund mailing list.

I'm very surprised it's shutting down. 3M uniques a month and still growing according to Compete.

Seems like it would have gotten acquired at the very least.

They aren't closing all of Wikia, just "Wikia Search" (which stagnated at 10K uniques/month).

Ah, thanks! That makes so much more sense.

The article also mentions Microsoft is shuttering Encarta-- a victim of Wales' Wikipedia. Win some, lose some.

There's an opportunity here for a hacker with low overhead to move into this market of an 'open search engine'. It doesn't necessarily have to be 'user powered' but should be much more open than Google/Yahoo/MSN's mighty algorithms.

Any particular suggestions?

I usually use google to search the wiki.

I guess they're just busy trying to avoid beaching themselves and trying to hear themselves think with all that ultra-low frequency sonar bouncing around these days. I mean, we all get a little User Generated Content fatigue now and again. Now imagine how hard it is to type with those really big flippers.

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