What’s Fresh?

Over the weekend, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales provided further insight into his company’s community-developed, open source search engine. Wikia purchased a web crawler platform called Grub and released it under an open source license.

According to Wales, the combination of wiki and open-source web crawler will provide an even better search experience than current search engines. His aim is no less than to unseat both Google and Yahoo.

The real challenge is that a user-driven search engine will be a constant target for spammers and search engine optimization hackers looking to improve their results. Both Google and Yahoo are constantly tweaking their search engines to keep search spammers from being able to achieve rankings that are not relevant to searchers. It is not clear how SearchWikia will deal with this issue.

Mr Wales has commented that, in contrast to Google and Yahoo, open and transparent searches are the “model of the future”. That seems like a bold statement, but only time will tell if Mr. Wales can deliver again.

A public version of this search engine is slated to launch by the end of the year.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS