Which search engine was launched in 2008 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales?

Wikia Search was launched in 2008 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. The search engine's public alpha opened on January 7, 2008, under Wikia, the wiki-hosting company Wales co-founded with Angela Beesley.

Wikia Search tried to apply wiki-style community participation to web search. Its designers promoted an open and transparent approach in which users could rate, edit, add, remove, or annotate results. The project had acquired the open-source crawler Grub and aimed to offer an alternative to the closed ranking systems used by major search companies.

The service was ambitious but small. At its public-alpha launch, it had indexed about 30 million pages, a fraction of Google's much larger collection. Its interface and result quality drew criticism, although an upgraded version released in June 2008 received a more favorable response from some reviewers.

Wikia Search did not become a lasting Google competitor. Wales announced the project's end in March 2009, citing low usage, difficult economic conditions, and Wikia's decision to focus on more successful projects. The service was shut down in May 2009.