Wikia Search Launches Private Beta, Public Launch Two Weeks Ahead

As promised to launch by 2007, the long-awaited Wikia Search has finally slipped into private beta. Wikia Search is expected to publicly launch on January 7th, but before going public, they are looking for test users to weed out bugs from their system. This announcement was made in their mailing list by Wikipedia/Wikia founder, Jimmy Wales.

Here’s the email:

Ping me if you want one…. we’re launched.

I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken…

Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here.

Wikia has been working on implementing their newly acquired Grub web crawler for a while now. And just last month, Jimmy showed some images of their new search engine. People were speculating that it was some kind of social networking site by Wikia, but perhaps those images were from profile pages of Wikia Search contributors.

I’m really interested in seeing what Wikia Search has to offer. I request for an invite, but I’m not supposed to post what I see until January 7th. I hope Jimmy pulls this one off successfully!

[Via: TechCrunch]