Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that he is laying the foundations for his long-planned community-developed web search service, which is expected to be a major rival for search engine giants Google and Yahoo!.His California-based commercial venture Wikia has acquired web crawler Grub from LookSmart, an online advertising and technology company that offers advertisers pay-per-click search advertising.
The move is part of Wikia's bid to develop a search engine service and will enable the company's users to scour the internet for relevant sites.
A public version of the site is due to be launched towards the end of this year, combining computer-driven algorithms with human assisted editing.
"We've had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space," said Mr Wales, adding that the "desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses".
Mr Wales also commented that open and transparent searches are the "model of the future".
Open search is part of Wikia's drive to promote the spread of free content publishing on the internet.
The company was launched in November 2004 and since then, it has seen the creation of over 750,000 articles edited by more than 200,000 registered users.
It is currently supporting the creation and development of in excess of 3,000 wiki communities in more than 70 languages.
