Wikia Search didn’t have to do as poorly in its short life as it did. By the time that Jimmy Wales announced the end of the project on March 31, the search results had improved somewhat, but the user interface was still mixing the cutting-edged with the half-assed and the non-existent, and most user input or activity for the project had ended by the Fall of 2008 (that includes the project’s blog and mailing list). 

Wikia Search could’ve followed other major search engines (Live Search, Google, Yahoo!) into the realm of vertical search, with separate search modes that made use of Wikia Search’s backend to search specific types of content (Video Search, Blog Search, even – HELLO! – Wiki Search, one that’s better than Wikipedia’s own in-site search), and it could’ve provided custom search for domain name owners.

It could’ve done so much more in such an amount of time, but it didn’t.

What went wrong?

EDIT: Wales’ latest gig, Wikianswers, will probably get into a legal tiff with WikiAnswers soon; they both lay claim to having been the first to use the name. Not necessarily saying that Wales may have to save face in light of Wikia Search’s end, but this will get ridiculous before it gets better.