This is interesting, the site is not live, but considering it involved Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, it’s worth noting.  The odd thing is that Amazon.com dropped A9, yet Wales’ search engine will ”launch with Amazon.com”: 

Jimmy Wales told The Times of London his search engine, planned to launch with Amazon.com, will use the same user-based technology as Wikipedia. The commercial version of the search engine will be developed through San Mateo, Calif.-based Wikia Inc., with a provisional launch planned for the first quarter of 2007, he said.

Wikiasari gets its name from ‘wiki,’ Hawaiian for ‘quick,’ and ‘asari,’ Japanese for ‘rummaging search.’

Earlier this year Wales said he secured multimillion-dollar funding from Amazon.com and a separate cash infusion from a group of Silicon Valley financiers to finance Wikia projects.

Read more here.  Amazon.com is investing in many non-linear areas, so it’s not a safe assumption to think that this search will be related to A9 or Amazon.com’s [traditional] core business.  However, since Wales launched Wikia, essentially a vertical, category-focused Wiki-based community, you can imagine that Wikiasari.com will be somewhat related to Wikia’s core… otherwise, no matter how much investors believe and trust Mr. Wales, they will have some issue with the conflicting focus.  It’s worth nothing that on Wikipedia.org’s Wikia page, there is a mention that: “Wikiasari (previously called Wikia) was an earlier project run by Wales that attempted to create a copyleft search engine.”

I have copied Mr. Wales to get some info.  Will keep you posted.

UPDATED: from Mr. Wales:

“The story is correct in the core, but confusing people as to Amazon’s involvement.  Amazon is not directly involved in the project at all.  They are an investor in Wikia.”

Disclosure: we run MetaMojo.com, which too is a vertical, category based search engine.

See our Head-to-Head Search Results: WikiaSearch (Wikiasari), Google, MetaMojo, Ask, AOL, MSN, Yahoo!.