The brains behind Wikipedia will soon be offering us Wikia Search, a community driven search engine that Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales hopes will eventually become a challenger to Google and other major search engine providers.Wikia Search's launch has been a long time coming, with speculation about the engine piquing interest here at bigmouthmedia back in December 2006, when TechCrunch posted a mysterious screen grab of what appeared to be a search engine called Wikiasari. A multitude of rumours followed as the search world debated the possible success of the endeavour. Now, over a year later, the project is soon to be revealed and truly put to the test.
An email sent to the Wikia Search mailing list by Jimmy Wales on December 24th invited a few individuals to take a look at the new service prior to its general release this month. This allowed the creators "'to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken" and presumably giving them a chance to spot problems before launching on a larger scale.
The Wikia Search project follows a different model to other search engines; Wikia hopes to offer a search service that is more 'transparent' by allowing users to see how the service arrived at their search results. The project will also allow individuals to help rank search results and filter sites using a community model similar to the one functioning so successfully for Wikipedia.
Wikia Search uses open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces and also includes the Grub search project, which crawls the web using user-donated processing power. The distributed crawler was acquired by Wikia from LookSmart in July 2007 and taps into the spare power of its net-browsing clients.
With the four main tenants of Wikia Search being "Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy", it's easy to see that, if these attributes can be achieved, Wikia might be able to garner a dedicated following of search engine users, but it's doubtful they'll be successful in attracting the kind of numbers that flock to Google on a daily basis.
However, Wikipedia has certainly gathered enough exposure and power over the last few years to bode well for future projects. Search Wikia is a project of Wikia Inc. a for-profit company established by Wales in 2004. In an interview with daijiworld.com, Wales asserted that even a 3% share of the search engine market would make Wikia Search sustainable.
With Google reportedly developing Knol, an online encyclopaedia that's touted as an emerging contender to Wikipedia, it will be interesting to see who fares better out of the boundary-crossing shake up. Maybe Wikia Search is set to become as much of a success as Wikipedia. And maybe Google's Knol will rival Wikipedia just as Wikia is hoping to rival Google Search. We'll keep our eyes peeled and fingers searching until we find out.
