Michael Arrington is reporting that WikiaSearch, Jimmy Wales’ much anticipated open-source search engine has actually launched, today. The closed announcement (mailed through the WikiaSearch mailing list) stated that selected people will be allowed to get into Wikia in the next couple of days before it hits for public consumption in January 2008.
Wikia is the brain child of Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales and is aimed at establishing a platform for the development of a new open/source search engine with user-editable search result.
Working on four organizing principles of transparency, community, quality and privacy, the Wikia Search project has been much anticipated by many the past couple of months.WikiaSearch is an ambitious project banking on the success of Wikipedia, to develop a new kind of search engine which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot.
Although, others have already gone towards the same path as where WikiaSearch is heading to, it still is interesting to follow how WikiaSearch would come up with its much talked about human-powered search engine. Will it be as successful as what Wales had done with Wikipedia? or will it just go towards the land of the forgotten web projects?
Isn’t it ironic that Google is moving towards developing its own Wikipedia while Jimmy Wales is working towards the development of his own search engine?
That’s how life goes in the search engine industry that we are all in.
