Wikia founder shares more search engine details

Author: Tim Smalley
Published: 31st July 2007
Comments (4) Stumble
Wikia plans to launch the community-developed search service late in 2007.

Wikia plans to launch the community-developed search service late in 2007.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of community driven encyclopaedia Wikipedia and its parent company Wikia, said last week that he is in the process of laying the foundations for a community-developed web search service designed to rival search engines from companies such as Google and Yahoo.

Wales told attendees at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention that the Wikia search service will combine computer-driven search algorithms and the much-needed human involvement that’s currently missing from the top search engines. He claims that the human editors would help to untangle search terms that have multiple meanings.

He also revealed that the search results would be generated using Lucerne, another open source project, and has said that he is looking to enhance the software in the future. He hasn’t revealed what he’s going to do to enhance Lucerne at this time though.

Wikia recently acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd, an open source distributed web crawler that claims it will help to revolutionalise Internet crawling technology using a global community of volunteers to crawl every website every day. Users wanting to take part can download the client from the Grub homepage – this will cut Wikia’s costs, as the company won’t need a network of computers to crawl the web.

Wales revealed that he expects a public version of the service to be available late in 2007 - there’s more here.

Discuss in the forums.
Quote Jamie 31st July 2007, 18:16
Could be great, although I wonder how they are going to tackle people trying to get themselves to the top of the results.
Quote samkiller42 31st July 2007, 23:20
I think i would still use Google, cant really fault google.

Sam
Quote Constructacon 1st August 2007, 07:23
Quote:
Originally Posted by samkiller42
I think i would still use Google, cant really fault google.

Sam
That's how I felt about AltaVista until Google came along.

As for people trying to skew search results, I'm sure the same will happen as with wikipedia: the community will catch on quickly and set it straight and a ban to the offending ISP.
Quote Demon Cleaner 1st August 2007, 14:16
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jamie
Could be great, although I wonder how they are going to tackle people trying to get themselves to the top of the results.

Well they seems to do moderatly well with Wikipedia. Besides if companies do it, surely it would mean bad PR? In my opinion wikipedia is the best web site in the world, hopefully the creators can have the same success with a search engine.
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