Wales summed up the decision like this,

“In a different economy, we would continue to fund Wikia Search indefinitely. It’s something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.

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. Join me there to help provide freely licensed answers to all the world’s questions.”

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Yesterday I spoke with Chris Whitten, the founder of FAQFarm, who said, "It’s perplexing to me that Jimmy [Wales - Wikia President] and Gil [Penchina - Wikia CEO] would choose to relaunch their site as ‘Wikianswers.’Although it’s true that someone had started a Q&A Wikia years ago, that doesn’t mean they have any stronger claim to the name than WikiAnswers. I registered the WikiAnswers.com domain even earlier than that, in June 2004." More of what Whitten said here.

A Wikia representative was kind enough to put me in touch with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. Here’s what he had to say:

FAQFARM was aware we were operating Wikianswers.

Wikia has hosted a Question & Answer wiki called Wikianswers since 2004, and we have revamped and re-launched it because we believe we can provide the best resource for people.

All that said, we believe Wikia’s Q&A site is better in part because its more in keeping with the wiki spirit.  The content is freely licensed (unlike wiki.answers.com) and anyone can contribute (wiki.answers.com requires you to register to change questions as an example). We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than any corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in a way that takes some rights away from the customer.

Ultimately it is up to users to decide which they like better. Those searching for "answers" might have a better chance of ending up with the Answers.com version. The first result on Google is Answers.com itself, which has a prominent link at the top to its version of Wiki Answers. A search for "wikianswers" also yields a top result of Answers.com’s version (though Wikia’s version is right below it).

UPDATE: Answers Corp. (the company behind the non-Wikia version) CEO Bob Rosenschein has a post up titled "WikiAnswers: setting the record straight," which offers his take on the subject:

We are admirers of Jimmy Wales but must set the record straight about the recent statement on Wikia’s site that he is the “founder of Wikianswers”.

Wikia’s Answers category is indeed one of thousands of wikis on its site, right between Ansible and Anthony Trollope. It started in November 2004 and had almost no activity for the past four years. By August 2007, the site had a total of 17 answers. By their launch last week, there were about 1,000. The site remains very small, despite their seeding thousands of unanswered questions last week… Read the post here.

Yedda is a question-and-answer service that’s seen a reasonable amount of success since its 2006 launch.  Yedda’s price tag remains unknown, yet since it’s raised about $2.5 million in funding, the service probably wasn’t too cheap.

That’s interesting, since AOL is supposed to be focusing on Platform A (which relates to advertising).  The acquisition of Quigo fed into this drive, but the additional purchase of Yedda doesn’t seem to relate.  So, despite fairly stunning losses (subscription revenues are down by 56 percent) and heavy layoffs, AOL’s not giving up on every non-advertising option.

Instead, it seems willing to go up against services like Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers.  In reference to Yedda, Michael Arrington notes, “[T]hey also partner with others to power independent Q&A services as well.  There are more than fifty partners working with Yedda now – example partners are ePals and The JobNetwork.  Yedda says those partners now drive 90% of their total traffic.”

If AOL’s dreams come true, those partners will also drive some fresh revenue to its door.

If you don’t know what WikiAnswers is, the site’s name should be enough to tip you off.  WikiAnswers isn’t directly related to Wikimedia or Wikipedia, however; instead, it’s owned by the same company that runs Answers.com.

That company (Answers Corporation) is quite proud of WikiAnswers, and rightly so – it reports, “for the first nine months of this year, WikiAnswers unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. has grown 317%, to over four million.  This ranks WikiAnswers as the second-fastest growing domain of the top 1,500.”

Also, on October 30th, “registered users grew by 1,867, a new daily record,” according to Answers Corporation.  Granted, those users (and/or the site’s owners) still have some work to do – I think there should at least be an answer to the eggshell question – but the rate of growth is nonetheless impressive.

As for the future, that appears to be largely up to the users themselves – company execs are pleased with where their suggestions have taken the site so far, and don’t appear anxious to make any major changes in the near future.

Questions on WikiAnswers have increased by 50 percent since June, from approximately 500,000 to more than 760,000. Registered users have increased to over 280,000 in the same time frame, up from 200,000.

According to comScore, unique monthly visitors in the U.S. increased by about 50 percent, from 2.2 million for June to 3.3 million for August. Daily pages views have also increased by 50 percent and Answers plans to make WikiAnswers an integrated part of Answers.com in the coming months.

"When comScore began tracking WikiAnswers in November 2006, we had about a million monthly unique users in the US," explained Bob Rosenschein, Chairman and CEO of Answers Corporation. "To have more than tripled it in only ten months demonstrates a real excitement about what we call ‘Q&A the wiki way’.

"This most recent increase of 50 percent, over the summer months when Internet usage generally drops, is further confirmation. The community – both casual visitors to the site and especially the dedicated supervisors who edit, organize and improve the answers – has really crystallized."