Monday, 30 July 2007

Wikia Search To Take On Google

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has said that he has started assembling bricks that will make Wikia, a search engine that he promises will be better and more unique than Google as it will be based on human searches and not algorithms.


Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites.

"If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."

Wikia plans to develop an "open source" Web search service with the help of volunteers that has made Wikipedia so popular as it is considered a secular sire, free from any sort of problems.

The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007, Wales said.

Grub was originally an open source project that was freely available to software makers to enhance as long as they shared any improvements they made. Wikia has acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd., which had halted work on the project.

Wikia plans to open up Grub to other developers to make improvements or to incorporate the crawler into other sites.

Wales' who has a goal to make Internet search more accurate has said that he would release the projects computer code under an open-source license that allows others to make amendments.

Wales' open-source approach to search is getting mixed reactions from other search experts. Some believe that publishing source code encourages innovation while others seem to be sceptical.