Wikia to rival Google, Yahoo with open-source search engine

Wikipedia founder wants to change balance of power

30 July 2007 14:02 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has announced that he is putting plans into force to create a Google-rivaling community-developed web search service.

Wikia, Wales' ad supported start-up, has bought Grub, a web crawler that will search the web for Wikia's coming-soon search service.

Grub was bought with the some of the $14 million in funding recently raised, including money from Amazon.com.

Wikia is a commercial service that offers thousands of Wikipedia-style sites on a range of subjects but the plans will develop the site to include an "open source" web search service that will run with the help of volunteers.

"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", Wales stated.

The new Wikia search will combine computer algorithms and human-assisted editing and should launch in Beta at the end of the year.

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Software, Websites, Google, Wikipedia, Wikia, Search engines