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.

Wikia has laid off 10% of their work-force. The startup co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley has about 43 employees in their company. Wikia is a search engine powered by humans. People vote for results as they search for keywords. The lay-off news is contradictory to earlier reports that Wikia was going to lay-off 30%.

Wikia is still hiring interns, advertising salespersons, and a Marketing Manager for Sports & Entertainment. Wikia has raised about $14 million in funding before the end of 2006. The first round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners at $4 million. And the other $10 million was led by Amazon.com. Marc Andreessen, Joi Ito, and Ron Conway was involved with Wikia’s angel round.

According to Quantcast, Wikia receives about 11.8 million uniques per month. Wikia is a also associated with Federated Media.

Wikia is built from MediaWiki, the same application that runs Wikipedia. Wikia launched a toolbar on the same day as Digg, a in August 2008.

The biggest Wikia pages include WoWWiki (World of Warcraft), Wookieepedia (Star Wars), Recipes Wiki, Marvel Database Project, EverQuest II, Memory Alpha (Star Trek), Yu-Gi-Oh!, and FFXIclopedia.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia has recently released a new open source project.  The new project is supposed to be a search engine that an open source community builds, similar to Wikipedia.  The open source tool used for the platform is Nutch and the index of web pages that revolve around Wikia currently was put together by Grub, a web crawler that Wikia acquired.

While there was a lot of hype built around Wikia’s search, the company insists that it is merely an alpha release and the search result quality will be low initially.  Michael Arrington’s review did not go favorably for the product, thus causing Wales to respond personally.  The debate is that Wikia was supposed to be a Google killer, but the alpha does not look impressive.

Release early, release often.

It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

-Jimmy Wales [comment on TechCrunch post linked above]

Just for reiteration, the difference between Wikia and Google upon early release is that the founders of Google found out how to download and index the Internet before releasing their search engine as mentioned in the book, The Google Story.  Wikia simply released with low quality to finally let the open source community flood in, go to work on the site, and create quality search results.  I first wrote about Wikia in December 2006 when the name was speculated to be Wikiasari.

I’ll hold off on reviewing Wikia Search in depth because it still has a lot of growing to do.  Wikipedia didn’t become the biggest open source encyclopedia a day after it went into public alpha, but now its the #9 most visited web site according to Alexa.  I’m not in the position to judge anything just yet.  This blog post is to just make people aware that the release is officially open.