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Wikia founder outlines plans for user-driven search enginenews
30 July 2007

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the internet, says he moving ahead with his plans for a community-developed Web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo!. (See: Wikipedia founder developing user-driven search engine)

Wales founded the free-to-edit Wikipedia encyclopaedia as a non-commercial venture that is one of the Web''s most popular sites. He also co-founded the Wikia ad-supported network of self-edited wiki sites. However, the two organisations have no formal ties.

Wikia has helped groups set up thousands of Wikipedia-style sites on topics ranging from popular TV shows to specialist health or travel, plans to develop an "open source" Web search service with the help of volunteers.

Without disclosing financial terms, he said that his commercial start-up, Wikia, had acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that would enable Wikia''s forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites.

Wikia has raised $14 million in outside financing, including its latest round of $10 million from Amazon.com.

The new 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. Human editors would help decipher terms with multiple meanings, such as palm, which can refer to location like Palm Beach, or generic topics like trees or handheld computers.

Speaking at O''Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, an annual gathering of open source software developers, Wales said, "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."

Search results are generated via another open-source software project called Lucerne. Wales said he is looking at options to enhance Lucerne, but would not detail his plans.

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.

Grub relies on distributed computing technology to power the crawler. Computer users who download the software at can share computer processing time when they are not using their machines, cutting the cost of Wikia developing its own network of computers to crawl the Web.

Open search is part of Wikia''s broader push to promote the spread of free content publishing on the Web. Wales'' objective is to make explicit the editorial judgments involved in modern Web search systems. Proprietary search systems such as Google Inc. keep secret key details of how their search systems work to prevent spamming and for competitive reasons.

Ultimately, Wales wants the Wikia search service to be available to other Web sites andsmaller publishers who would be able to install a custom version of the service that points Web site visitors only to links with a specific site. Target customers might include local newspapers, for example.


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Wikia founder outlines plans for user-driven search engine