Wikia Search, pitched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as a Google killer when it launched in January 2008 is no longer.

Wales wrote in a post that Wikia Search “has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped” and then blamed the economy for the demise.

Wikia Search failed to find an audience, which in turn meant that it failed to establish a credible search index. The idea was to take Wikipedia crowd sourcing to search, so search results were edited and inserted by users. Things started to look bad in August last year, when Wikia launched a toolbar that allowed users to scrape results from Google; as I wrote at the time, providing a tool that encourages users to use a competing search engine (one that was claimed would be killed) reeked of desperate times.

Wales says that he may return to search again in the future, but we wouldn’t count on that being any time soon.

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Wikia Search is relaunching with several new features today. As the name might suggest, the utility lets you actually customize and edit search results. You can add or delete results from any given search — something the big league search sites would sooner shut down than allow.

The updated Wikia Search includes the ability to rank items, add “related site” entries to a find, comment on entries, and even access a Google or Yahoo search from within the Wikia results. The site is also toying with the idea of some social networking features such as personal profiles and the ability to make “friends.”

Wikia makes its belief in transparency quite clear. You can look at a list of recent changes to entries to track how and by whom any given result was modified. The site’s list of principles even takes a shot at the major search engines’ insistence upon keeping their results and their methods so closely guarded.

So can searching really work as an open and democratic process? It’ll sure be interesting to watch this one and see how it affects things. We’ve all grown accustomed to Google’s complex and untouchable algorithm-based methods. I don’t know that Wikia Search’s concept will ever knock that kind of system out of the mainstream, but it definitely adds an interesting twist into the equation — particularly for SEO-focused web developers who might have to cater to a different kind of ranking protocol.

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