Web Search Service “Wikia” details plans for rival to Google and Yahoo!

Founder of Wikipedia has acquired Web Crawler and plans to launch community developed web search.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said Friday; he is setting the edifice blocks in place for a community-developed Web Search Service that would competitor of search engines such as Google or Yahoo!

Wales told a symposium of software developers in Portland, Oregon, that his commercial start-up, Wikipedia, has gained excavate, a revolutionary web crawler that will enable Wikia’s approaching search service to clean the Web to Index related sites.

Moreover, Wales said at California Based Wikia that “if we can get high-quality search results, I think it will really chance the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers”.

Wikipedia that helps communities and groups to set up thousands of Wikipedia-style websites on different topics ranging from popular TV shows to travel based information websites, is just going to create an open-source Web search service with the help of Volunteers.

As per Wales, he said that the new Wikia Search Service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007. This seems that Wales wanted to take charge on both Google and Yahoo! search services. If we can see Wales trying to create a search website that is quite similar to the Wikipedia, wherein human editors can edit one of their own posted encyclopedia information. This means that human editors would help untangle terms with multiple meanings, such as Hawai, which can refer to location like Hawai Beach, or generic topics like Hawai huts, restaurants etc.

Wales explained more about how search results can be generated. He said that they are going to use an open-source software project called Lucerne. Moreover, he said he is looking forward to enhance Lucerne in detail.

Wikia has purchased Grub from Looksmart.com, which was an originally dispersed open source project that was generously accessible to software markers to augment as long as they shared any improvements they made on it. This seems that Wikia plans to open up “Grub” to other developers like Drupal and Wikipedia to make improvements or to incorporate the crawler into other sites. Terms of the deal between Looksmart and Wikia were not disclosed announced by the Officials.

San Francisco-based Looksmart has been announced that they will provide banner and text advertisement across Wikia’s network of Wiki sites. Moreover, Wikia had been using Google advertisement services. In addition to that Wales said that he has great interest from other commercial partners for advertisement. This seems that Wales decides not only one partner, might he is looking toward someone other for lower bid. So the chance of Microsoft and Yahoo YPN is still be there. Ultimately, Wales wants the Wikia search service to be available to other Web sites owner those are small business and large business publishers. They would be able to put in a custom version of the service that points Web site visitors only to links with a specific site.

All in all “Grub” relies on dispersed computing technology to crawler. Computer users who wish to download the software at (http://www.grub.org/ can carve up computer dispensation time when they are not using their machines, cutting the cost of Wikia developing its own network of computers to crawl the web.