Wikiasari: Wikimedia founder to launch a search engine project

Wikiasari: Wikimedia founder to launch a search engine project

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia is all set to start a new project named Wikiasari. This would be a search engine service that could take on the likes of Google and Yahoo! in the future.

He is working with the ecommerce giant Amazon.com on this project and it uses the same user-based technology which powers the Wikipedia.

Wales added that he is planning to develop a commercial version of the search engine through Wikia Inc and an initial launch is slated for early next year.

He said: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results.”

He further said: “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

Wales however admitted that taking on giants like Google, Yahoo! and MSN would be a big challenge.