Wikia Search

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' latest brainchild is Wikia Search, a for-profit search engine that Wales says he launched partly to make a political statement that supports open source. He views it as unhealthy that a small group of players control the flow of all search engine traffic, a model that is inconsistent with the traditional open Internet. As with Wikipedia, Wikia Search's content will be provided by thousands of volunteer contributors, and Wales says the software and data will be released under a free license. "We have open-source software and cheap commodity computers in an open, neutral setting so that people can innovate very cheaply," he says, adding that this allows people to experiment and perhaps make search a ubiquitous infrastructure component. Wales anticipates that many organizations will build their own search engine services thanks to the software's availability on an open platform, and he says the trick to persuading people to use Wikia Search is delivering quality and a search experience that is at least as good if not better than their preferred search engine. "Because we are putting all the software out there in an open-source fashion, we expect in some ways to generate our own competition," Wales says. Wikia Search has received $14 million in financing, and Wales says it will be funded via an advertising business model. He says Wikia Search volunteers sign in with their user account, and they can build a profile, connect to friends, send messages, and perform other social networking activities.