Wikipedia Founder Plans To Launch Search Engine

David Hyun
URL:
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006697731

Tokyo, Japan (AHN) - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on Thursday indicated his plans to launch an open source search engine early next year. According to Wales, the first test version of the search engine could be released sometime in 2007 so that programmers could spot and remove the bugs that only become visible with real-world usage.
Speaking at a news conference in Japan, Wales said the project being run by Wikia Inc. could snag as much as 5 percent of the search market.
Wales said that although the project is still in its preliminary phase, it has already started attracting attention from a community of engineers, programmers and developers.
"We are getting a lot of interest from second-tier search players who are really interested in some of the alternatives that might be available," he told Macworld.com.
The Wiki-founder went on to criticize Google and Yahoo! for keeping their search technologies under wraps and said that the technology used by Google should not necessarily be given the market edge it is receiving.
"The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said at the conference.
However, he acknowledged that publishing a search algorithm, which usually determines how a particular site is ranked, would make it too easy for spammers to "game the system...and my whole idea won't work," he told the Macworld.com.
Still Wales hopes that the search engine would ride on the success of the collaborative search technology currently enjoyed by his reader-edited Website Wikipedia and could transform the development of future search engines.