For a new online-search startup called Wikia Search, Monday morning must have seemed even more harsh than usual: reviews of the newly-launched search service have not been flattering, to say the least.

Mike Arrington -- the editor of TechCrunch, a technology blog that can help to make or break companies with a favourable review -- called the service a "letdown," while the Centernetworks blog described it as "not ready" for prime time. Stan Schroeder, who writes for a popular tech blog called Mashable, said point-blank that Wikia Search "sucks." Others were even less complimentary.

Wikia Search has two strikes against it, in a way: the first is that it wants to compete with Google, the $180-billion behemoth that pretty much owns the online search business. And the second is that Wikia Search comes from Jimmy Wales, the founder of the "open source" encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. That's a pretty tough act to follow.

Although there have been concerns raised about its accuracy, Wikipedia is still one of the most respected Web services next to Google (a site in which Wikipedia's entries on various topics happen to show up fairly prominently). So it's natural that there would be some pretty high expectations for Wikia Search, which Jimmy Wales has described as an attempt to bring the social media, "open-source knowledge" approach behind Wikipedia to the search business -- in part because he thinks Google is too powerful.

At the moment, however, there's very little "there" there, as someone once said. There's a Google-style page with a simple search bar, but the results are pretty much a rudimentary sampling of the Web -- something a company might have been happy with back in the late 1990s, but that looks fairly lame next to Google's. And there's little sign of the social networking that Jimmy Wales has said he hopes to bring to the site in order to compete with the search leviathan.

At the same time, of course, the site is in what tech geeks call "alpha" -- the term for an early trial release. In comments on TechCrunch, Jimmy has said that he knew there would be pretty high expectations, despite his attempts to keep them restrained in the weeks leading up to the launch, so he didn't find the backlash surprising. Look on the bright side, Jimmy: there's nowhere to go but up.