14 DAY TRIAL // Jimmy Whales, the Wikipedia founder, is shooting for the stars with the latest project that he has announced and he hopes to eventually challenge Google and other established players with the Wikia Search project, an open source search project (but I do believe that the name gave that away and I did not need to specify it).
So far, the project has assembled the basic technologies needed for a search engine, which include the search application, the search algorithm and the web crawler. That and the fact that it will allow technology enthusiasts to help filter sites and rank the search results, by using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia, should give it a jump start in its early days.
The idea came to Jimmy Whales as a reaction to the opacity he says that Google and Yahoo have up front when it comes to explaining how the search results are being arrived at. The transparency to the users should be the main selling point for the search project that will most definitely be later developed by the contributors, just in the same manner that Wikipedia itself took a lot of time and entries in order to manage to become helpful, so don't expect it to be as good as the main competitors on the market right now. According to Jeremy Kirk from IDG News, "The search project is part of Wales' for-profit company, Wikia Inc., which offers a software platform that anyone can use to build wikis. In a similar way, the Wikia Project will allow other people to build their own search engines." A search engine per person? That's an interesting thought, all you need to do is to index all of your belongings and the place they should be in and then look them up via a much more friendly and familiar interface.
Anyway, the best of luck to the Wikia team because they are really going to need it, if they are as ambitious as their boss says they are.