The building blocks for a community-driven internet search engine that will compete with the likes of as Google and Yahoo are being put in place according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, US, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, had acquired Grub, a distributed web crawler that scours the web and indexes relevant sites, from California-based company Looksmart. Volunteers can download the Grub web crawler, which runs in the background on their PC, indexing web pages according to their content. The crawler will be used as the basis for Wikia's forthcoming search service. By contrast, search engines like Google run their own web crawlers and keep details of the way they work secret. Search results for Wikia's search service will be generated using an open-source search platform called Lucene. Wales said he is looking at options to enhance Lucene, but would not reveal any details. Untangled results But, like Wikipedia, Wikia's search service will also seek to make use of human editors. When a public version of the search service launches, toward the end of 2007, users will be invited to help untangle results by, for example, identifying the correct site for terms with multiple meanings. "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," says Wales, chairman of Wikia, based in San Mateo, California. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome." Wales says Wikia will open up Grub to other developers so that they can make improvements or use the crawler for their own purposes. Wales founded Wikipedia, a non-commercial project and one of the web's most popular sites, in 1996. He also co-founded Wikia, although the two organisations have no formal ties. Wikia lets users create specialised Wikipedia-style sites on topics ranging from popular TV shows to health or travel. Explicit judgments Open search is part of Wikia's broader push to promote the spread of free content publishing on the web, according to Wales. The objective, he says, is to make explicit the "editorial judgments" involved in modern web search systems. Proprietary search engines like Google keep key details of their search systems secret, to prevent link spam, as well as for competitive reasons. Ultimately, Wales wants the Wikia search service to be available to other websites and smaller publishers, so that they can install a custom version of the service on their site. Target customers might include local newspapers, for example. He detailed his plans at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), an annual gathering of open source software developers. Source: http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn12387&feedId=online-news_rss20 Sounds good, if SEO becomes as easy as editing a few pages on wikipedia.
I don't think Google is worried at all about Wikia, but I think there's room for Wikia to capture some marketshare and become a widely used resource.
Do you honestly think this new engine will be 1/2 as popular as Google? The brand share and top of mind exposure that Google has will continue to overpower any competitor. Sure, vertical search portals can compete, but Jimmy is targeting a small group of people who believe in ethics still. Alot of seos are going to go after his engine and spam just like they did with Google, and that's going to be the challenge Mr. Wales will have to face if he wants to play in the game.
Yep, sounds about right mauiman. I didn't think you were saying wikia would have much more than that. Although I can't wait to start spamming the new engine myself.....
I'm running the grub.org client for giggles to see what happens with it. its kind of buggy and only sort of working... but it says that youc an add your sites for a local search type thing - but it doens't work yet..
google will still the lord of search engines at least for quite a while. Google company is getting bigger and bigger by the time, even outside the net. i don't think anyone will be able to match its power for now.