Wikipedia has been one of the most successful endeavors in the history of the Internet, but its crowd-sourcing nature apparently doesn't apply well to web searches as founder Jimmy Wales has now pulled the plug on Wikia Search. The project once billed an open search platform to take on Google is no more as of today with just over 11,200,000 queries made over the course of its life.

Wikia Search allowed users to influence relevancy by voting URLs up and down and annotating their searches. While the idea failed to gain much traction, it apparently was interesting enough for Google to take a stab at it with Search Wiki, which lets you do pretty much the same thing on Google itself with the exception that it only affects your results instead of everyone's. Wales says that Wikia, its parent company, will still live on as it redirects and refocuses its resources on its main Wikia service for building wikis as well as Wikianswers.