As of last night, Jimmy Wales has ‘closed the doors’ on Wikia Search, formally drawing a line under the failed community search offering.
According to Wales the engine “has not been enjoying the kind of success” which had been hoped for and he cites the current economic climate as a deciding factor.
When I covered the launch, back at the beginning of last year, I had little faith in the success of the engine from an algorithmic perspective, nor did I hold out much hope for the quality of its results, but I really did not expect to see the offering removed this soon, but Wikia Search now permanently redirects to the Wikianswers question and answer site.
The decision was clearly a hard one for Wales, who has always championed projects within the search space, but with Wikia Search reportedly only receiving around 10,000 unique users a month, where Wikia.com is closing on the 4 million mark and the fifth fastest growing member community destination in February, the move to "do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not" has to make sense at this time.
The next question is, what does the future hold for Google Knol?
[UPDATE: In response to the three emails I have received already (and it is not even 9 o'clock yet), no, this is not an April Fool's joke.]