Wikipedia founder to launch search engine

Words been spreading around the blogosphere about Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, launching a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo. Labeled Wikia, it’s a long term project (2 years) whose goal is a ‘search engine that changes everything.’

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. Here, we will change all that.

There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.

Nutch and Lucene and some other projects now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.

Wikia is funded by Amazon.com and Bessemer Venture Partners and like Google and Yahoo, revenues will be ad based.

For lawyers publishing valuable legal content via blogs and the like Wikia would have real value. Instead of scheming search engines for high rankings, greater emphasis would be placed on valuable content for niche audiences.

Technorati Tags: Wikia