Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the wiki-based community encyclopedia, has announced that that Wikia Search will be closed down soon.  While this is terrible news for proponents of the popular community-based search product, the impact of Wikia Search will live on.

Wikia Search, for those unfamiliar, is a search solution that relies not upon mathematical algorithms for ranking search results, rather Wikia Search utilizes user input to rank and position search results.  Additionally, the Wiki community had the ability to delete, add to, and comment on entries, creating a community feel to the once-popular Wikia search engine.

This Wiki-based search is a very popular service.  According to an eWeek article, Nielsen Online reported that Wikia Search was the web’s 5th fastest growing member-driven destination in February 2009, following sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Even though Wikia had a short life, it’s impact on the search market was pronounced.  In fact, as a result to community-based search being so popular, Google recently implemented SearchWiki, a similar service now found inside a typical Google search result set.

The point that remains is this: No company “owns” search and there are loads of innovations that will manifest from companies who are focused on bringing them to market. We at Taptu believe we are helping push search into the mobile market in an exciting new way.

We look forward to having you join us on our journey!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 9:36 pm and is filed under On the Radar, Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.