Wikipedia Founder To Push Open Source Software Search

December 25 news: According to foreign media reports, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to launch a search project named "Wikia Search" (Wiki Search) based on open-source software on January 7, 2008. This project aims to challenge search giants like Google.

The Wikia Search plan is similar to the basic technology of search engines, including search applications, algorithms, and web crawlers. The plan will allow tech enthusiasts to use a community model akin to Wikipedia to help filter websites and rank search results.

This concept will challenge existing web search operators by providing users with more transparent search services. Wikia Search will allow users to see how search results are generated. Wales explained that Yahoo and Google's searches are opaque services that cannot explain how search results are generated.

On Monday this week, Wales announced in the email list of the Wikipedia website that he had invited some people to test the early version of this search platform. The search platform will be released on January 7.

The development of this search tool will take time. The initial service will not reach the level of leading search engines. Just as the Wikipedia website took a long time to get enough input information to become a useful site, contributors must spend a long time developing this search platform.

This search plan is part of Wales' profit plan for his Wikia company. This company provides a software platform that allows anyone to create a wiki page. This search plan will also adopt the same approach to let people build their own search engines. (Author: Tian Hong)