Are normal people finally starting to warm to wikis as publishing tools? Wikia, which hosts 50,000 enthusiast sites on the same wiki software as Wikipedia, is claiming profitability of sorts on strong growth. Over the past six months, Wikia sites (which also includes Wikianswers) have increased unique visitors 76 percent in the U.S. to 6.5 million in July, 14.2 million worldwide (comScore).

The orange line in the chart above is just Wikia.com, which had 5.9 million visitors in July, and the blue line is all Wikia sites combined. The company deadpooled its Wikia Search product last March.

By organizing each wiki into a niche communities of gamers, sports fans, movie buffs, and so forth, Wikia has been able to sell more targeted advertising into each niche. With the recent growth, Wikia now claims to be profitable—not ina strict GAAP-accounting sense, but in that revenues from ad sales are “significantly higher than the cost of operations in total,” says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina.

Wikis need a critical mass of repeat contributors before they become useful. So far, Wikia’s growth has been a slow burn, and certainly pales in comparison with the original Wikipedia. But if the growth of the last six months continue, it may just now be coming into its own.

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We already have dozens of those, including popular sites like WikiAnswers.com (not affiliated with the Wikia service but with a terribly confusing name resemblance), Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers (anyone else spotting a naming pattern?) and a plethora of similar services. Wikia thought there was room for one more regardless and was going to try and make a difference by focusing on an open, freely licensed community where copyright remains with the user who submits the content at all times.

And unlike Wikia Search, the startup’s disappointing attempt at creating a crowd-sourced search engine experience that was shut down by the company a couple of months ago, Wikianswers seems to have gotten a bit of traction with that strategy. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina tells us Wikianswers recently hit some significant milestones: the site apparently now boasts 200,000 questions of which 50,000 are answered, and it’s generating a healthy 1 million page views per month.

Granted, this is still a far cry from the traffic some of its more established competitors are seeing – comScore pegs WikiAnswers.com at 79 million monthly page views in the U.S. alone and Yahoo! Answers at 4x that, for example – but Wikia of course only launched its Q&A service about half a year ago.

Much too early to tell if Wikianswers will prove to be a winner for the company, but the current milestones suggest its future may at the very least be a lot brighter than the ill-fated Wikia Search service ever was.

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It is going to take more than just an open search platform to take on Google. Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced today that he is shutting down Wikia Search, the company’s experiment in creating better search results through crowdsourcing. Wikia Search attempted to port the Wikipedia model over to search by allowing anybody to modify results by including new links or moving natural results up the page. The initial launch last year was awful, but the experience improved over time. Still, it never really attracted anything more than a trickle of searchers. We are placing it in the deadpool.

Then Wikia Search got Googled when the search juggernaut launched its own Search Wiki feature, which lets you do pretty much the same thing on Google itself (move results up the page, block results, add comments—except it only affects your search results, not everyone’s). And so it goes. You cannot compete in search if your idea can be easily copied by Google.

But if Wikia Search had never existed, Google might never have felt pressure to add wiki features to its interface. In that regard, Wikia Search did have an impact beyond its own site.

Wales says that Wikia will focus its resources on its main Wikia service for building wikis, as well as Wikianswers, a Q&A service which launched earlier this year and also faces stiff competition, but not from Google.

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Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.

We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).

And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers! (see second screenshot below), but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)

Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:

Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.

Wikianswers is built on the same wiki platform offered by Wikia, and it is already being promoted from Wikia Search. Building up a searchable Q&A repository is a natural add-on for a search engine or any online information database. (See our post on Mahalo Answers).

But, really, How is Wikianswers different than any other Answers site? Unless Wales can satisfy that question, people will ask look for answers to their own questions elsewhere.

Update: Wikia CEO Penchina’s explains below in comments:

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different
- The content is freely licensed under GFDL unlike other answers sites allowing it to be re-used and re-purposed by others for free
- Anyone can contribute (other answers sites require you to register)

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor.

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This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

That is the equivalent of about 57 startups with ten people each. And those are just the ones that we or other news outlets have been able to confirm. Our list of tips is much longer than that and we are working through it to confirm as many as we can. For instance, Cake Financial has laid off 30 percent of its staff, or 6 people.

Another company with unreported layoffs earlier this week was Meraki, which I’ve confirmed let go 20 percent of its staff (10 people). That makes Meraki the third Sequoia-backed company to announce layoffs this week. (The other two were Mahalo and imeem). Sequoia urged all of its portfolio companies to make cut-backs earlier this month.

At least most of these startups are already done with their layoffs, unlike Yahoo which announced a 10 percent cut is coming but won’t say who exactly is losing their jobs for another few weeks. Layoffs are bad enough, but don’t prolong the misery.

This past week alone, tech companies have laid off 13,809 people:

Company–––––––––Layoffs

Xerox————3,000
Daptiv————–21
Haute Secure———3
Cake Financial——–6
Mercent————-6
Dell————-8,900
imeem————-20
Mahalo————-6
TicketMaster——300
Eons—————8
Veoh————–15
Yahoo———-1,500
Wikia—————3
Meraki————-10
Break.com———-11

Total———-13,809

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

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Update: Wikia has confirmed that about 10 percent of its workers have been laid off, but points out that it is still trying to hire for open positions.

At the beginning of this year, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales officially launched his attempt at a human-powered search engine, dubbed Wikia Search. TechCrunch was not impressed initially, to say the least. Although it has come a long way since launch, it looks like the young venture behind the experimental search engine is feeling the nasty sting of the troubled economy.

Rumor has it that parent company Wikia is letting go 30% of its current 43-person workforce, a percentage that appears to be the rule of thumb for lay-offs these days. TechCrunch has been hearing rumors along these lines as well.  The company, which also offers wiki software, has raised a total of $14 million to date from rockstar angel investors like Marc Andreessen, Joi Ito, and Ron Conway, as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, the Omidyar Network and Amazon.

At this point, we have calls and e-mails out to the company asking them to confirm the cuts.  We’ll update this post if they decide to respond. (See above).

The company is rumored to be bleeding cash, despite its effort to clean up its act in delivering decent search results and its recent addition of an API, opening its engine to anyone who wants their own data or application to show up in results. Other products of Wikia include a wiki creation tool with the same name, and Scratchpad Wiki Labs, which allows people to test and build mini-wikis before moving them over to Wikia’s full wiki sites.

Traffic numbers for the search engine seem to be heading in the right direction, but by now it should be clear that having a business model that depends solely on Google Ads will prove insufficient for many startups to weather the ongoing financial storm and pending recession.

The job cuts have been added in the TechCrunch Lay-off Tracker.

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It is like Facebook Apps for search results.

Wikia Search is launching the WISE framework with a bunch of partners: Digg (returns recent frontpage headlines as results), Indeed (for job search), Kayak (for travel searches), Last.fm (for music searches), and even Twitter (relevant Tweets). The other partners at launch will be AccuEather, AcronymFinder, Amie Street, Creative Commons (CC images), PleaseDressMe (T-shirt results) Thomson Reuters, Snooth (wine), and Yelp (local reviews). Partners can customize results not just for keywords, but create their own search apps. (Kayak’s, for instance, let’s you enter departing and returning dates when you search for a flight). So like Yahoo BOSS and Search Monkey, WISE lets developers change both the result ranking and the look and feel of customized results. In fact, anything that can be written in HTML can turn up as a result.

Already, regular users can help improve results on Wikia Search by voting individual results up or down, adding in their own links, or submitting “good” sites to Wikia’s index via a Firefox add-on. But now with the WISE API, Wikia Search is tapping into professional developers as well. In this way, Wikia Search is hoping to make its search engine better by relyingon the work of others. Says Wales:

One of the things we are interested in is vertical searches with a good API and sensible results (otherwise the community will give it a thumbs down). Hopefully, it will drive some traffic to them and make our search results better.

And what about gaming the system? Isn’t this just a free way to get sponsored search results? To prevent that sort of thing, each new app will be manually approved before it is rolled out. Wales criteria is that he will approve them as long as “they are not awful.” (Everyone else gets to test their apps in a developer sandbox until then). And like any other search result, users will be able to vote them up or down.

Will adding all of these apps be enough to make WikiaSearch itself relevant? Currently, it is averaging a measly 50,000 search queries a day. That gives it a whopping 0.013 percent share of the U.S. search market. (Even AOL does about 17 million search queries a day).

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Today they did something really smart – they released a Firefox Add-on that lets users add search data without going back to the Wikia Search site itself. That lets casual users who want to contribute to the project to do so with less effort, meaning they may contribute far more data.

The toolbar also alters search results pages from Google and Yahoo (sorry, Microsoft, you didn’t make the cut) and adds a rating widget and an Add button next to each result. Again, this makes it super easy for Wikia Search users to improve the project’s data without actually visiting the site.

Overall Wikia Search is starting to look like a real search engine, with decent results for a lot of queries. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months.

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Wikia Search is finally ready to play with. Jimmy Wales admits that up until now his company’s project to apply the wiki concept to search:

Pretty much sucked. It has not been usable on a day to day basis.

We agree. But today, Wikia Search is beginning to suck a lot less. It has only indexed 30 million Websites, but it is finally rolling out a set of editing features that lets searchers reorder, add, remove, rate, annotate, and comment on results. It also makes it easier for anyone to try to game the search results. Although, as with Wikipedia, an spammers can be banned by the community. We should see some fierce edit wars on this one.

The Ajax interface lets you drag results up or down the page. Hover the mouse over a result, and a menu appears on the right. You can edit the title or description, and spotlight the result with a yellow highlight.

Here is what the editing mode looks like for a search result:

If you don’t like any of the results you see, you can add your own by simply pasting in the URL.

Wikia Search also allows people to “annotate” results. If you click on “annotate,” it opens up a window with the actual Web page in question. Anything you click on or highlight will be added to the result. For instance, I added Michael’s Twitter photo to the Twitter result for “TechCrunch”:

I also added a comment: “Best way to keep up with Arrington.” If other searchers think those additions are helpful they can rate the result highly, if they think it is spam, they can delete the additions. Wales is relying on the community that grows up around Wikia Search to ban anyone trying to game the system. He is also relying on it to create the best search results. He says:

This is Day 1 for that really active community participation. In terms of what happens next, we will find out in the next couple weeks. How broad, how deep, how much activity.

And if searchers don’t like what they find on Wikia Search, handy Google and Yahoo icons make results from those search engines just a click away.

Here’s a video with Wales demonstrating the new features:

Click To Play

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Personally, I find the UI to still be something that an engineer would love more than a graphic designer. But it is an improvement. Adding skins is a move in the right direction. What’s your favorite wiki?

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Generally Wikimedia publishes these five months or so after the end of the year; this year they took eight months. Total donations and other income increased from $1.5 million in 2006 to $2.7 million (the period covered is prior to their recent fundraising effort). Donations of Google stock actually made up a material portion of contributions – 681 shares were donated in fiscal 2007 (worth about $315,000 based on the current stock price).

Travel expenses jumped significantly from $140k to $264k. Given that this period included time when Jimmy Wales was pitching Wikia Search around the world, some conspiracy theorists are speculating that travel expenses related to the for-profit Wikia (which Wales founded) were being reimbursed by Wikimedia Foundation. Wales, however, told me via email that the foundation does not reimburse him for any travel expenses at all, even for pure Wikipedia events, in order to remove any doubt about mixing funds between the entities. “I fund all that myself, out of my own pocket personally,” he said.

The financial statements also note, though, that Wikia and Wikipedia do share some infrastructure costs, assets, employees and expenses:

The Organization shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007 is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The Organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006 valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007.

Through June 30, 2007, two members of the Organization’s board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc.

Financial statements for 2006 are here.

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc 2007 Financial Statement

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Jimmy and Jason each gave a brief overview of their human powered search engines. Jason railed on Google and other big engines, saying algorithms have failed to control spam and SEO gaming, and that humans must be involved to get good results. Jimmy was more circumspect, and spent most of his time arguing that large numbers of people will be willing to spend time helping Wikia Search develop good results.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, however, was when Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick, who didn’t attend, has a good basic transcript of the session (proving to me once again that it is often easier to cover a conference remotely instead of batting crowds and dealing with terrible Internet coverage). I was able to take some video of a couple of interesting segments, though, embedded below.

In the first segment Wales gives the audience his overview of Wikia Search, and Calacanis jumps in with a few observations as well. The second is Marissa’s comment on what she sees as a false dichotomy – Google Page Rank, she notes, is based on real humans linking to sites on the web. Listening to her felt like a cold shower after a night of heavy partying.

As an aside, the DLD conference is clearly one of the better events I’ve attended in the last few months.

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First of all, it’s barely a search engine at all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year). The search results are poor and thin, as would be expected if not for the huge expectations that have been set. Absolutely no one is going to use this to search the web, until (and if) it is greatly improved.

But beyond the poor search results, there is really no “human” element to the engine at all. That functionality will come later, says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina. For now, users can add keywords to their profile – things that they are interested in, etc. When a search is conducted by others on those terms, the user’s picture is shown in the right hand column. Eventually, users will be able to edit and improve results for searches they are interested in. But currently, all users can do is add keywords to their profile that they might someday be interested in, and/or contribute to a “mini-article” that appears at the top of search results for queries (example).

And about those profiles. As anticipated, Wikia Search is yet another social network. User profiles include basic elements like a photo, adding friends, and information about interests and skills. And in a direct rip off of Facebook, Wikia Search profiles contain an activity stream of stuff you and your friends have been up to over the recent past.

Wikia search would be a disappointment even without the massive hype we’ve had to endure. And taking that hype into account, this product is an inexcusable waste of time.

To be fair, CEO Gil Penchina warned me it wouldn’t be a great product at launch. It’s simply a proof of concept of what can be created using open source software and little money, he says. Fair enough. But it’s time for Wales to be quiet, let this thing evolve or not, and eventually let the software do the talking. Eventually Wikia will make the index available to third parties. But the index needs to be reasonably decent before anyone will want it. Wikia has a long way to go to get there.

Update: Good debate in the comments below, including a couple from Jimmy Wales.

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As we wrote December 23, Wikia’s Jimmy Wales is pitching the search engine as a Google competitor; its a strong statement to make but does Wikia Search Alpha take the good fight up to Google? Not yet.

I ran a couple of different search terms into Wikia with mixed results. A search for TechCrunch for example shows TechCrunch.com as the first result, but type in Michael Arrington and the only TechCrunch result is at 7, and it’s TechCrunch France aside from something called a “mini-article”. I tried a couple of other people in Wikia Search as well, the service has no issues with finding sites/ companies by name, but really struggles when you’re searching for people.

The user interface is clean and uncluttered, but the choice of font colors has a lot to be desired.

Ultimately you can judge for yourself at alpha.search.wikia.com

Update: as pointed out in the comments, Wikia Search also doesn’t suggest results based on incorrect spellings, for example Wikiq doesn’t recommend Wikia, either in the results itself or with a “did you mean Wikia” line as Google would do.

Update 2: see Michael’s thoughts here.

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From: jwales@xxxxx.com
Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available
Date: December 23, 2007 7:04:01 PM PST
To: search-l@wikia.com
Reply-To: search-l@wikia.com

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.

–Jimbo
_______________________________________________
Search-l mailing list
Search-l@wikia.com
http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/search-l
Change options or unsubscribe: http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/options/search-l

I spoke with Wikia CEO Gil Penchina on the the rules around the beta – users are being asked politely to withhold posting any information about the beta until the public launch on January 7. Hopefully people will respect that – there are bound to be some major hiccups and Wikia deserves a chance to iron those out before what is sure to be a ton of attention on the product.

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“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way…But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

A lot has happened since that announcement. Mahalo, a Sequoia backed startup with their own approach to human powered search results, launched in May and is showing promising early growth. Meanwhile Google, perhaps somewhat annoyed by Wikia Search as well as Wikipedia’s ongoing refusal to add Google ads to their pages, announced Knol earlier this month – clearly a shot across the Wikipedia bow.

Not much on Wikia search, however. They’ve set up a page to discuss the project. In July Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, which had technology to allow distributed web crawling by users. And an early screen shot, showing a Facebook-like profile page, was shown in South Africa in November.

Wikia Search In 2007 Or Not? Jimmy Wales Say Yes.

But the promise has been to launch Wikia Search this year, and time is fast running out. There’s just one week left in 2007.

Today a report was published that Wales, in an IRC chat, promised to make the end-of-year launch date: “ the search engine *will* launch before the end of the year, probably in private beta first, and then open to the public in early january. No specific dates are certain yet. But sooon.”

I asked Wikia CEO Gil Penchina if the quote was accurate and whether to expect a launch in the next few days. His response was “Can’t comment on exact timing.”

It won’t be important a year from now if Wikia Search launches this year or early next year. But it is time for the product to be judged on the merits of the search results created by it, not on a series of press leaks and hazy screen shots. I look forward to the launch, whether it be this year or (hopefully at the latest) next.

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From a product perspective, Knol is not much different than existing products like Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine.

But Knol isn’t really aimed at Squidoo and Hubpages. It’s much more likely that Google is jealously eyeing the massive traffic that flows through its search engine to Wikipedia. As Nick Carr has noted, Wikipedia continues to climb and climb in search results for many top search terms.

More Ad Inventory Needed, ASAP

Wikipedia, a non-profit, has stubbornly resisted any efforts to monetize its pages. Google would kill to supply ads to Wikipedia. Barring that, competing with them makes a lot of sense.

Google needs to grow revenue to support their valuation. And for that, they need ad inventory. It wasn’t surprising when Google started hosting news directly and allowing comments (that = page views). So the idea of them hosting a knowledge base shouldn’t be surprising, either.

Authors have a choice – they can have ads or not. But if they have ads, they can only choose Google. Many authors are going to include ads, and Google will get extra inventory.

Delicious Timing

Wikipedia has caused more problems than just refusing to take Google’s ads. They are also launching a much anticipated search engine this month via their for-profit arm, Wikia (Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hates it when Wikia is called that, but it’s damned hard to tell where Wikipedia ends and Wikia begins sometimes). Google isn’t likely to be particularly scared of Wikia’s new search engine, but it has probably been a little annoying for them to watch all the press about the upcoming “Google Killer.”

Google doesn’t usually pre-announce products before launch. in this case they did. Why? Perhaps as a reminder to Wikipedia that competition can flow both ways.

Anyone Remember Google Base?

As a content management system, Knol is a kissing cousin to Google Base, a classified ad platform that Google launched in late 2005. Google Base has gone exactly nowhere – if anything it’s a spam farm and nothing more. But at the time of its launch the New York Times and others heralded it as a major disruptive force to the classified ads world. Knol may be Google Base with a little more strategic thought applied.

No Conflicts Here, Move Along

Google says that Knol pages will be indexed into their search engine but will have no special ranking. That’s a little bit untrue, since they’ll be hosted by Google and will have the advantage of Google’s hefty PageRank to lift them in search results. And since no one will be auditing Google to ensure that Knol pages are treated just like everyone else, there are bound to be claims of conflict of interest. The fact is, Google will make money from Knol, and so they’ll have a financial interest in moving people to those pages. That makes them less believable in the role of a neutral gatekeeper.

Google is now synonymous with search. Offering Google Knol and putting it in the search results is analogous to Microsoft offering Office for the Windows platform. Sure, anyone can compete with Office, but Microsoft has a natural advantage and finds ways of keeping market share. The Knol team will likely do the same over time.

Wikipedia v. Knol

Wikipedia gets massive support from the community because it’s non-profit. Google can’t compete with that, so they’re focusing on putting the authors’ names in lights and giving them a little cash on the side, too. That should help them pull some heavy Wikipedia contributors over to their project.

Very soon we are going to see a lot of Wikipedia content moving wholesale to Knol. Wikipedia content is basically free to use, redistribute, copy, whatever, under the GNU license:

All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.

Anyone writing for Knol is likely to at least peruse Wikipedia content before publishing. And if they see anything good, they are at liberty to simply lift and copy it over to Knol, and get a adsense check for their time.

So, in a way, Google has found a way to monetize Wikipedia content after all.

In a poll on Friday, TechCrunch readers narrowly said Google hasn’t overstepped its boundaries with Knol. If Knol is a success, those results may be a little different a year from now. In fact, the more successful Knol is, the more uncomfortable people are going to be with Google as gatekeeper and content provider.

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Mahalo is a search engine that focuses on user link submissions and an editorial process to theoretically produce better search results than algorithm-only engines like Google. It first launched in May 2007.

The company already pays users for quality submissions. Today, they are adding user profiles and other social networking features to further incentivize users to submit quality content.

Editors decide if links submitted for a particular search term should be inlcuded in search results. If a submission is accepted, the user gets credit and a higher score. If it’s banned, the user’s score takes a hit. All of the results are shown on a user profile (click image above to see larger version), so heavy users will be inclined to add new links carefully and increase their score. The service has around 26,000 pages of search results, and each one represents 10-30 different search queries. If a search returns no Mahalo pages, results from other search engines are shown. 1,000 or so new pages are created each week on the site, says CEO Jason Calacanis.

Mahalo has direct competition coming from Wikia. Based on early screen shots that show user profiles, Wikia seems to be taking a nearly identical approach to maximizing user participation.

Mahalo is doing very well based on early Comscore statistics, which report 2 million monthly page views and 874,000 unique visitors. More importantly, the trend is clearly towards fast growth. Compete statistics agree.

Mahalo has raised around $20 million on two rounds of financing. Another rumor says their last round was valued at over $100 million.

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It was eleven months ago that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales first mentioned his vision for a people-powered search engine that would eventually launch under his for profit startup, Wikia.

Not much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search is here.

But the promise has been for Wikia Search to launch this year, and it appears to be on track. Yesterday Matthew Buckland reported that Wales showed “some of the first screen shots” of the new project (the first, as far as I know).

The main screen shot is a profile page for a user (see above) that looks surprisingly like a Facebook profile. It was taken by Nic Haralambous.

The Man v. Machine debate as it applies to search is about to begin. By this time next year we should have lots of data on the performance of Wikia Search, as well as the new startup Mahalo which is also in this space. Until then, we can spend our time speculating and, I guess, continuing to live with Google for our search needs.

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Tonight they added new feature that should generate a lot of page views – they have fully integrated a forum/message board into every wiki.

This isn’t Tangler-level forums (which we consider to be the bleeding edge), but they’ve put a lot of thought into the feature set around these message boards. Posts can be tagged, the view expanded/contracted, there are email notifications of new messages, and the search feature works well. Any forum thread can also be turned into a wiki with a couple of clicks.

CEO Ben Elowitz says the two products go together well – wikis are great for evergreen content but don’t allow for good conversation. Forums allow great conversation but aren’t great for new readers. The hope is that by combining them they’ll allow for better content for all users. And in the process get a lot of page views.

Other startups innovating in the forum space (besides Tangler, mentioned above) are Meetro and Grouply.

The hosted wiki space is crowded, and Wetpaint competes with Wikia and PBWiki, among others. Comscore shows Wikia in the lead with over 3 million monthly uniques, followed by Wetpaint with 1.3 million and PBWiki with 770k (Wikipedia, of course, is the 800 pound gorilla, with 228 million unique monthly visitors):

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Wikinvest is meant to be a research portal where anyone can contribute information on company profiles, investment concepts, or chart analysis. The site is a competitor with financial profiles and news listed on Yahoo and Google Finance, as well as Wikia’s investment portal and company profiles on the mother of all wikis, Wikipedia.

Wikinvest does a good job of providing business focused company profiles, which include market information and product histories. Wikia doesn’t have company profiles and Wikipedia is focused on company history, not analyzing market data.

They also have a very novel feature, wiki charts, which let users explain trends across real-time share price graphs through embedded comments (example).

All this data is useless if it can be undermined by one malicious editor, so Wikinvest has a reputation system that tracks user trust. Trust is based around how often a user contributes and how much of that work is preserved. Users that contribute less and are infrequently over-written, are given the least scrutiny from administrators. The site also focuses on companies with at least $100 million in market capitalization.

Wikinvest still faces the stiffest competition from the financial sites themselves, which offer real time news along with their professionally edited content. Wikinvest, however, has a wikis advantage of nimbleness, by quickly adjusting to new trends and interlinking across concepts.

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The site, as you can guess, is about caring for your parents in their “Golden Years”. It provides articles about dealing with your parent’s healthcare, financial, legal, housing, and life issues written by professionals or other users. It seems like a more smartly age-related service than Eons social network for the over 50.

Details on the site are sparse, as the site is only now opening its beta. However, it will likely have the usual forum features and social networking profiles.

The team shouldn’t have too much trouble setting up the site since the founders, Jim Scott and Steve Fram spent eight years at BabyCenter, another community site targeting raising children. Sites like Caring.com seem to have a simple formula, find an underserved vertical, put up a community driven content management system, get some editors, and own the Google search results. Most of these sites are taking on specific verticals, but Wikia is spreading horizontally, using mediawiki as the CMS.

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Anyway, back to the news: Wikia is launching Wikia Gaming tonight, a collection of video game focused wikis. The sites contain over 250,000 articles on games already, on all major platforms. The World of Warcraft site is the largest single wiki, with 43,000 articles.

Wikia, which has raised $14 million from Bessemer and Amazon, claims a quarter billion monthly page views. 800,000 articles on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages.

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The site has been slowly rolling out new features. Wikia CEO Gil Penchina described it to me as “Wiki 2.0″ – because it combines the best features of open source wiki software with social networking features like adding friends, building a profile, meeting new people, create groups, etc. ArmchairGM also allows users to add “foes” in addition to friends, since a lot of sports rivalries are generated on the site.

The site also has a unique user generated virtual gift product. Unlike other social networks, users create the gifts themselves by uploading images. Other users can then use those gifts, too, and some become quite popular.

Wikis and social networks don’t exactly mix well. Parts of the network, like user profiles, need to be locked down so that only the owner can edit them. Other parts of the site remain wide open and allow anyone to edit.

And its growing, fairly rapidly. ArmchairGM alone is now at 1 million monthly page views. Wikia has also rolled out the ArmchairGM software for ten other verticals not included in that page view count – see, for example, Foodie, Gaming, and Politics. The company recently brought in the NFL as a site-wide sponsor.

Parent company Wikia continues to grow rapidly, says Penchina. They had 250 million page views in August.

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