• CNet, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 11:15 AM

Another Google killer bites the dust: Wikia Founder Jimmy Wales on Tuesday said the company would close Wikia Search after just 15 months of operation. The site's lofty goal was to be a user-generated search engine through which users could influence rankings. However, the search project failed to gain traction. By August 2009, Wikia Search had just a 0.000079% share of the search market in the U.S., compared with Google's 70.77%, according to Network World.

In an interview, Wales said the current economy has forced him to "reassess everything" and "do what we need to do to get to profitabililty." He said that Wikia Search, with only 10,000 unique users per month, wasn't making the kind of numbers that would justify keeping the project going. "This one is too far away," Wales said. "It was going to take at least a another year to two before it's usable by the public, and we can't afford that right now."

Two full-time employees will lose their jobs as a result of Wikia Search being shut down. Wales noted that Wikia's other projects, including Wikipedia, generate 30 million uniques per month. He still believes that search needs to be open, in contrast to the proprietary technology deployed by major search engines like Google. "I'll return to this again when the economy is good," he said.

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