Wikia plans "Open Source Search " to rival Google &Yahoo

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites of the world, is all set to launch a community-developed web search service that would pose challenge to the top-ranked search engines such as Google, Yahoo and others.

Wales said it would present the ‘open search’ through his San Mateo, Calif.-based commercial start-up Wikia Inc., which is the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic.

In a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, Wales said that Wikia last week has acquired web crawler Grub that will enable its forthcoming search service to make thorough search on the Web to index relevant sites.

Grub, the distributed crawling service that operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, was previously owned by LookSmart, the San Francisco, California-based online advertising and technology company that provides relevant solutions for advertisers, publishers and consumers. It has been released under an open source license for the first time in four years.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Wales. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

After helping groups set up thousands of Wikipedia-style sites on topics ranging from popular TV shows to specialist health or travel, Wikia now intends to develop an “open source” Web search service with the help of volunteers. It plans to use volunteers' idle computing resources to contribute to the Search Wikia project.

With its project, Wikia aims to provide community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic and by unveiling a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration it has given a boost to its mission.

"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. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to be the likely outcome," Wales added.

Launched in January 2001, Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia, is a noncommercial project that is one of the Web’s most popular sites. Any individual who has access to the website can edit content. Wikipedia operates with servers in Florida, Amsterdam, and Seoul. It has published over 6 million articles in 250 languages (As of March 2007).

Wikipedia has been inviting controversy off and on, over its reliability and accuracy due to the fact that readers can edit entries. Some of those incidents have forced Wikipedia to introduce safe guards into its entry creation and editing process.

Launched in November 2004, Wikia contains more than 750,000 articles on 2,700 topics that have been created and edited by more than 200,000 registered users in 70 languages. It also houses several computer programming-related wiki sites such as, WikiaPerl, Visual Basic Wiki, and the PHP Wiki.