Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has dropped his ‘community-based’ search engine Wikia. He says that despite it’s lack of success to date he’d have continued funding it it stronger economic times.

Wales launched the search engine early last year, but revamped its concept completely in June. The idea was that users could add or delete any results which showed up in the list for a particular search term, along with moving them up or down the results list. They could also edit the page title and description which appeared in the results.

The logic was that the site would combine Wikipedia’s strengths with search technology. While there would obviously be people who altered results either as a prank or for other non-constructive reasons, the site worked on the theory that enough people would add their personal knowledge and opinion to produce results which were genuinely useful for the overall population.

The phrase “the wisdom of crowds” was mentioned a lot, in reference to the James Surowiecki book of the same title which promotes the theory that the combined knowledge of a mass of people can provide greater detail than that of a few experts.

Whether the concept of Wikia Search was viable is tough to tell. It seems to have failed for a couple of reasons. It only covered around 30 million pages at launch, too few to become many people’s primary search tool. And in turn, the lack of users meant the potential benefits never came to fruit.

Ironically the concept will outlast the site. Google recently added a similar feature which allows users to make similar changes to which results appear and in what order. The difference is that this only affects the results you see yourself when logged in to the site rather than the overall index. Google’s take on Wikia does allow users to add comments about results, though this doesn’t appear to have attracted any serious interest.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 1:55 pm under Google.

Read more entries by John Lister.
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