03/31/09
The dream of bringing the same collaborative approach to the search engine that Wikipedia brought to the online encyclopedia will have to wait.Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he is pulling the plug on the experiment, Wikia Search.In a blog post Tuesday, Wales said the search engine "has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped."The idea was to let anyone help decide which Web sites appeared for different search queries - a far cry from the approach of search companies like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Most search engines use constantly evolving algorithms to keep up with the proliferation of Web sites and the spammers looking to game results for a better spot on the list.But the plan had its skeptics from the start. The project launched last year with tens of millions of Web pages indexed, a fraction of the billions available with major search engines.
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