• Forbes, Tuesday, June 3, 2008 11 AM

Wikia Search, Jimmy Wales' wiki-based approach to Google slaying, is more than a year old now, but audience measurement firm Hitwise said its traffic is still too small to measure. It's also far from being critically acclaimed: in the blogosphere, critics have canned the fledgling search engine, deeming it "miles behind the competition" and "an inexcusable waste of time."

Badly in need of a redo, Wiki Search founder Jimmy Wales on Tuesday announced the search engine's relaunch; this time, users will actually be able edit and filter search results -- a feature missing from the beta and alpha launches. Wales argues that the real test of wiki-based search begins now.

Wales said the idea with the latest version of Wikia Search "is to give Wikia search users the same abilities as Wikipedia users to control the content." Users can now directly annotate results with content from other sites and even delete an entire site from inclusion in the search engine's results with one click. Wales admits that the "wiki" part was essentially missing from Wikia Search's beta launch in January 2007. "I've joked that no matter what people say about Wikia Search now, they'll have to admit it doesn't suck as much as it used to," he said. Let's hope he's right.

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