Wikia kills its search engine, now can Google please kill Knol?

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced plans to kill off the Wikia Search project. Wikia Search was built to be sort of the Wikipedia of search engines. While a computer generates initial search results, users can adjust the order of results and even alter descriptions. When I checked out Wikia Search last summer I was actually pretty impressed with its feature set. And then I forgot about it and never visited the page again. Because the truth is that the search engine didn't really do a better job of helping me find what I was looking for than Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search.

Wales says the decision to shutter the service is a financial one. In the current economy it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend the time and money developing the service at the expense of other Wikia projects.

Now that Wales is pulling out of the search business, I can't help but wonder whether Google will take the hint and pull out of the encyclopedia biz. Google is also dealing with a tough economy. This week the company laid off 200 people in its sales and marketing division. And in January Google closed the door on Jaiku, Google Notebook and Google Video.

But the company hasn't closed Google Knol, a service that many people see as Google's answer to Wikipedia. Knol isn't really an encylopedia. Rather, it's a spot for experts to publish pages about topics they're well versed in. But it doesn't have Wikipedia's user base, visibility, or influence. Perhaps in a better economy it would make sense to continue developing Knol, but right now I'm not sure it makes any more sense for Google to compete with Wikipedia than for Wikipedia to take on Google.

[via CNet]

Tags: wikia, wikia-search, wikipedia