Wikia Search, a community-driven open-source search tool, will get its first public preview on Monday, according to co-founder Jimmy Wales…
“The founder of Wikipedia says taking the online encyclopedia’s collaborative approach into the field of search would not dethrone Google Inc. or another major search engine — at least not soon…”
New York — Wikia co-founder and chairman Jim
my Wales announced the public will get its first view of Wikia Search, an open source, community-driven search engine, on January 7.
“After months of talk and a few weeks of invitation-only testing, Wikia Search is all set to open to the general public next week.”
With four basic principles in mind (Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy), Wikia will officially come out in an unpolished alpha-phase- a move aimed at fine-tuning the engine with the help of its future users.
“We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken,” said Wales in an e-mail sent to the Wikia community.
Wales admits his company’s search engine is not an immediate challenger to Google or Yahoo, but hopes the community construction of the search engine will bring increased transparency to the method by which search results appear.
On Monday, search enthusiasts can start building Wikia Search by filtering and ranking search results using open-source software and community-based editorial influence that will result in a more transparent process that allows end-users to see how search results are obtained.
In an e-mail sent to the Wikia Search mailing list on December 24, Wales wrote that he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form. “We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken,” he wrote.
Wikia Search, which aims to allow people to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, will have open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces.
Similarly to all the other search engines, Wikia Search will assemble the basic technologies for a search engine, which includes a search application, a search algorithm and a Web crawler. The search platform includes the Grub search project, acquired by Wikia in July, which employs user-donated distributed processing power to crawl the Web.
However, different from all the others, the project will let tech enthusiasts help filter web sites and rank search results, using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia.
The idea is to challenge the established players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wales has described Yahoo and Google as opaque services that do not explain how results are arrived at.
Wales says he hopes to have an index of between ‘50 to 100 million’ Websites when the search engine launches. “This is the public launch of a full-scale, high quality search engine,” he says. “We are looking at every point in the process to see where we can push the editorial control out into the community.”
Wales is aware of the reports eager to position this as another Google vs. Wikipedia-style battle, and he acknowledges Wikia Search is launching to “change how the industry works” while admitting his company is taking a different approach. “All of the software we are creating is going to be open-source,” he says. “One of the things that is really important to us is it is essentially a political point.”
“That reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic,” said Wales, chairman of Wikia Inc., the for-profit venture behind the search project.
Engineers at Google and other search companies continually tweak their complex software algorithms to improve results and fight spammers — those who try to artificially boost the rankings of their own sites. Search companies have not disclosed many details to avoid tipping off competitors and spammers.
Wales says pretending search results come from “some magic algorithm” does not help the concept of democracy or transparency, which goes against the characteristics the Web embodies. “All of these things are parts of the puzzle, but it is all going to be released under free license,” he says. “The amount of human editorial influence will be much higher than anything we have seen before.”
Wales’ approach would open that process. Initially, participants will help make such decisions as whether a site on “Paris Hilton” refers to the celebrity or a French hotel.
Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of the industry Web site Search Engine Land, has his doubts. Finding all the Web sites to index and staying ahead of spammers are huge undertakings, Sullivan said.
“I think he does not really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world and the amount of traffic that flows to it and the attempts that are made to try to manipulate it,” Sullivan said.
Despite the likelihood Google and Yahoo will continue their dominance in the search engine market, Eric Raymond, President Emeritus and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, says Wikia’s initiative is an inherently positive foray. “More open-source competition is always good; even when it does not achieve huge market- or mind-share, it keeps incumbents healthily scared,” he says. “I’m glad Wikia is happening, if only because somebody needs to keep Google nervous.”
Wales, who also co-founded user-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, hopes Wikia Search will eventually rival other search companies by making the way in which search results are arrived at more “transparent.”
“The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses,” Wales said in a statement in July. “Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
Even as Wales tries to challenge search, Google has announced a project that could challenge Wikipedia. Google’s version, called knol, will differ from Wikipedia by identifying who wrote each article and giving authors a chance to share in Google’s advertising revenue.
For more information visit: www.wikia.com/wiki/About_Wikia