Wikia Search

Wikia Search was a free and open-source Web search engine and a part of Wikia (originally Wikicities) operated by Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The "public alpha" was launched on January 7, 2008.The "public alpha" of Wikia search project The roll-out version of the search interface was widely criticized by reviewers in mainstream media.

On June 3, 2008, an upgraded version of Wikia Search was released with additional features such as improved screen display and facilities for users to rate, edit and enhance the search results. In particular, it offered users the possibility of adding pertinent URLs to the results displayed and deleting any misleading results with immediate effect.Wikia Search opens its doors, Heise Online, 6 June 2008. The improvements were widely welcomed by a number of former critics.Second Wikia Search version gets backing from former critics, Computer World, 4 June 2008

By August 2008, Wikia Search held a 0.000079% share of the search market in the U.S., compared with Google's 70.77%.Wikia Search, Cuil trailing Google by a long shot, Network World, 2008-08-19 Google is also conducting experiments with page ranking based on user feedback, but Jimmy Wales responded that Google's random tests and a closed algorithm are different from the open community-oriented, so called crowdsourcing, attempts of Wikia Search.

The site was said to be going down after March 31, 2009;"Update on Wikia", Jimmy Wales however, as of April 16, 2009, the site was running, but with "So long and thanks for all the fish! Have a specific question? Try wikianswers!" near the bottom of the page. Finally on May 14, 2009, the search engine service was brought to a halt. Queries to the Wikia Search URL: http://search.wikia.com/ were redirected, with a message in part stating "The Wikia Search project has ended."

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (; born August 7, 1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur and a co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia."The Wikipedia project was founded in January 2001 by Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger," quoted from the April 25th, 2004 first-ever press release issued by the Wikimedia Foundation. ?

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He attended a small private school, a university preparatory school, and then earned bachelor's and master's degrees in finance. While in graduate school, he taught at two universities. Wales later took a job in finance, and worked as the research director of a Chicago futures and options firm for several years. In 1996, he and two partners founded Bomis, a web portal that targeted males, and which hosted, and provided the initial funding for, the peer-reviewed encyclopedia Nupedia (2000?2003) and for its successor, Wikipedia.

In 2001, together with Larry Sanger and others, Wales helped launch Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia which enjoyed rapid growth and popularity.

a b g h i "Wales, though, was a businessman. He wanted to build a free encyclopedia, and Wikipedia offered a very rapid and economically efficient means to that end. The articles flooded in, many were good, and they cost him almost nothing. ... In 2003, Wales to diminish his own authority by transferring Wikipedia and all of its assets to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, whose sole purpose is to set general policy for Wikipedia and its allied projects. ... Wales's benign rule has allowed Wikipedia to do what it does best: grow. The numbers are staggering."

c "Wales focused on the bottom-up strategy using Web rings, and it worked. Bomis users built hundreds of rings?on cars, computers, sports, and especially 'babes' (e.g., the Anna Kournikova Web ring), effectively creating an index of the 'laddie' Web. Instead of helping all users find all content, Bomis found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet, helping guys find guy stuff."

d e f "The wiki technology quickly gained a devoted following within the software community. And there it remained until January 2001, when Sanger had dinner with an old friend named Ben Kovitz. ... Over tacos that night, Sanger explained his concerns about Nupedia's lack of progress, the root cause of which was its serial editorial system. ... Kovitz brought up the wiki and sketched out 'wiki magic,' the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions. If it worked for the rambunctious hacker culture of programming, Kovitz said, it could work for any online collaborative project. The wiki could break the Nupedia bottleneck by permitting volunteers to work simultaneously all over the project." As Wikipedia's public profile grew, Wales became the project's promoter and spokesman. Wales is historically cited as the co-founder of Wikipedia, though he has disputed the "co-" designation in declaring himself the sole founder. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organization which operates Wikipedia. He holds its board-appointed "community founder" seat.

In 2004, he co-founded Wikia, a privately-owned, free Web-hosting service, with fellow Wikimedia trustee Angela Beesley.

Wales has been married twice and has a daughter with Christine, his second wife, from whom he is separated. He describes himself as an Objectivist and, with reservations, a libertarian. His role in creating Wikipedia, which has become the world's largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world's most influential people. Wales is the de facto leader of Wikipedia;

his exact position on the project is a matter of public and press debate.