Many people have used the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia (founded by Jimmy Wales), Although it is not a reliable source of information all the time, many still enjoy the great amount of information which is shared between the users.

Well it seems that Jimmy Wales is slowly entering the Search Engine field by gathering commotion about the new search engine he is planning on releasing - Search Wikia (formerly known as Wikiasari).

There have been a good amount of misconceptions which has been derived due to the curiosity of what this project is. Many people believe that Search Wikia is the same thing as Wikisearch . This is not the same thing, since Wikisearch is what searches the Wikipedia Encyclopedia. Furthermore, the name of this search engine is "Search Wikia", not "Wikiasari", which was the name given to a previous version of the project which built up to Search Wikia.

Despite the fact that Amazon is a contributor to Wikia Inc. - Search Wikia is not related to Amazon's A9.com Search .

Many new search engines are trying to focus on a certain aspect of their features. The new revived Ask.com search engine has been trying to get their users to focus on the aspect of the tools which are available to their users. ChaCha Search is trying to focus their users on the point that humans are powering their search. So what would Search Wikia want to provide their users?

From the looks of it, they plan on completely changing the search engine industry:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.

It seems that he Jimmy Wales is looking to build a human-powered search engine. Now will this be with actual humas assisting you in your search results like ChaCha Search? Or does he plan on creating a way for users to suggest websites for common search results?

For now we can only assume based on the type of people he is looking for:

I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 5:19 am and is filed under Search Engine News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.