Wales, who hadn’t made a post on his blog since January 20th, admitted in an addition this morning that "Wikia Search . . . has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped."

He then continued, "In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely.  It’s something I care about deeply. . . .  But for now, we will be closing the doors on the Wikia Search project (as of March 31, 2009) and will be re-directing and refocusing resources on other Wikia.com properties, especially on Wikianswers."

This development represents quite a blow to supporters of user-generated search.  After all, since the man behind Wikipedia couldn’t make it work, the odds of another contender getting ahead seem pretty slim.

Still, at least for a little while, the closure of Wikia Search might give Mahalo a little bit of a bump.  And Wales shouldn’t be too depressed over this little defeat, as Wikipedia achieved complete victory over Microsoft’s Encarta yesterday.

About the only person who’s being magnanimous (and can afford to be) is Google blogger Matt Cutts, who welcomes Wikia to the search business, although MG Siegler at ParisLemon says it actually looks pretty decent for something that’s in alpha. I’m inclined to give Jimmy Wales the benefit of the doubt on this one, but not because I’m one of those Wales sycophants that the always curmudgeonly Seth Finkelstein mentions.

As usual, something approaching what I think is a fair viewpoint emerges from the comments section of a blog — in this case, TechCrunch. Mike says that Wikia is disappointing, and in the comments Jimmy says that he warned everyone not to have high expectations about what it would look like, and notes that Wikipedia looked pretty rough in the early days too. That’s the problem with social anything — you can’t just pop out of the cake on day one with a built-in thriving community.

Is it just a bunch of links cobbled together by Nutch and Grub (names that sound like a couple of animated characters from a new Disney blockbuster)? Yes. It’s in alpha, for pete’s sake. For my part, I think I’m going to try and forget about Wikia Search for at least six months and then take a look around and see what’s there. If it’s still a ghost town, then maybe there will be something to get concerned about.

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