Jimmy Wales Decides To Shut Down Wikia Search, Focusing On Wikianswers

Wikia was a search projected founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The company was founded in 2004 and has about 42 employees based in San Mateo, California. Since the company started, they have raised about $14 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and Amazon.com.

Jimmy Wales pointed out that Wikia.com itself has seen tremendous growth. It was the fifth growing member community destination in February 2009. The top 4 were Twitter, Zimbio, Facebook, and Multiply. Wikia.com’s Wikianswers Q&A website was seeing the most growth and so the company has decided to pay more attention to that service. Basically Wikia Search wasn’t seeing the success that they were hoping for. Going forward the Wikia Search project will be shut down on March 31, 2009 and it will forward to Wikianswers.

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