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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