From O’Reilly Radar:

I have to be honest that my first reaction to Wikia Search was lukewarm, and I fully support Arrington in his assessment that Wikia Search is no viable replacement for Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, or any of the other established search players. But Wales takes out the air of Arrington’s choler by commenting that “it’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine”, recalling that

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

Were Wales goes wrong is that Wikia has released a search engine on a limited index with no opportunity for users to contribute. In terms of Wikipedia, it would be the equivalent of launching an out-of-copyright dictionary but giving users no ability to edit the erroneous articles or adding new. Wikia should not have launched without, and that is a mistake.

Results are less than stellar…  We spoke with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia a while ago and we spoke about his plans to monetize the UGC (User Generated Content) model.  Good to see that it has launched, now only time will tell if it will work.

Jimmy Wales‘ new endeavor Wikia is going live on Monday.  Can UGC search compete against Google?

It will be interesting to see if Wales’ foray into for profit enterprises succeeds.