Wikia Search is reportedly live, and is due for public launch on 7 January 2008

Source: http://search.wikia.com/

I wrote about Wikia Search in January 2007. This 23/12/2007 message from Jimmy Wales on the Wikia Search mailing list states that a public version of Wikia Search will launch early next month:

"Private pre-alpha invites available
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."

A week earlier, community contributions were requested to define a "whitelist" of sites for the first crawl. More from Wales:

"As many of you likely know, we are now doing some preliminary crawls in anticipation of the upcoming launch.  Information is going to change quickly in the next 2-3 weeks, but I'm getting excited. One of the things we want to do is launch with a basic first crawl.
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Whitelist
Please add sites there, including comments, and also let's have a healthy on-wiki debate at:
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:Whitelist."

Keep an eye on the story and its ripples: news; blogs.