Wikia Search Engine Coming Soon!

Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is planning a 'people powered' search engine, for 2007, inspired by the popular web encyclopedia. The project called Search Wikia, is currently underway and is looking for community members, to build an open source alternative for web search. The Wikia search page confirms the project, and clarifies that Amazon or A9 has nothing to do with Search Wikia.

According to the Wikia page, Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet and, it is currently broken due to lack of freedom, community, accountability and transparency. Search Wikia Project aims to change that, by allowing users themselves to edit search entries, with the help of an editorial committee.

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The Wikia search page says, "Nutch and Lucene 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."

According to unconfirmed reports, the project will be released to the public in the first quarter of 2007.