by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Reports that Amazon and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will be launching a search engine called Wikisari in 2007 are creating confusion. Andrew Girdwood
On the 23rd of December Techcrunch posted a screen capture of what was thought to be the Wikiasari search engine. Amongst the comments on the post was one from Jimmy Wales himself, "The screenshot has nothing to do with anything related to the Wikia Search project, which in turn has nothing to do with Wikpedia,"
On Christmas, Michael Arrington updated; "So if Wikisearch isn't Wikiasari, what the heck is it?" In explaining where the original post came from, Arrington wrote, "Our source was good, and I went with it".
Techcrunch's screen shot showed a search engine interface with the logo "Wikisearch" in the top left. The search engine has a small tag cloud across the top of the screen, sponsored listings on the right, wiki links above the organic results and then organic search results in a similar style to Google's. Wikisearch is a search engine.
Wikia's own site describes Search Wikia as a new open source search engine. It supersedes a project known as 3apes which was to have been a directory-style search engine. Search Wikia is both wiki and database of URLs, keywords and other meta content. Search Wikia is a project of two halves; the wiki and the search engine software. It is the search engine software which is called Wikisari. The project itself has no official name but has inherited the moniker Wikiasari from the software half.
Jimmy Wales is creating a for-profit search engine. In an interview with The Times he said, "Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term 'Tampa hotels', for example, and you will not get any useful results." The Times article also calls the search engine Wikiasari.
Amazon's involvement is thought to be purely financial, as they are part of the $4m funding Wikia has managed to raise, and Mr Wales has stressed that his project is nothing to do with A9.
One possibility for the origin of the screen capture showing Wikipedia-like design wrapped around a search engine is simply the monetisation of Wikipedia's search functionality. A "web search" extension for the Wiki's "go" or "search" functions would provide a valuable revenue stream for the site.
The original screen capture uses the phrase "Wikisearch" as a logo and it looks likely that phrase will not be synonymous with either Search Wikia or Wikiasari.
