Search Wikia is from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The alpha release became available on Juanury 7, 2008. Wikia says they are working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine.
They decided to be very honest and say:
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We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.
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Here is how they explained the sometimes rather bad search results:
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Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks
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Wikia also stated the following:
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search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and that it can and should therefore be done in an open, objective, accountable way. This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search.
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Search Wikia depends on volunteers.
Users can rank the quality of the individual search results to influence the search results. They say they will be able to notice those who try to abuse the system.
Jimmy Wales says that eventually Search Wikia will be better than search engines from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com. Others search engines in the past have said the same thing without much luck. Jimmy Wales also said he doesn't know how long it will take Search Wikia to reach industry-standard quality search results, but he believes it will be at least 2 years.
Wikipedia and Wikia Search have no connection other than Jimmy Wales is a founder of both.
Here is a link so you can give Search Wikia a try and see what you think of it
Search Wikia - Search
Wikia says they have the search engine of the future
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