Wikia Search: The Community Driven Search Engine

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced last week the launch of Wikia Search, a new community driven search engine. This new search engine is available as of today (Monday 7^th January 2008) and its aim is to establish a platform for the development of a new open/source search engine with user-editable search results.

The community driven search initiative is based on the four organizing principles of transparency, community, quality and privacy, relying on human intuition to bring results which spiders/crawlers and algorithms cannot.

Perhaps most exciting about the project, is the Search Wikia Whitelist, which "is a list of sites that the community considers to be prime "must have" sites for the first crawl of the web."

Wikia Search anticipates to have around 35 million URL's in the first of three indexes, which will be a list of URL's "that should evolve to be a generally accepted consensus of a good starting point of sites that should be deep crawled and included". Currently, the top tier in the order they appear on the list include:

• en.wikipedia.org
• *.wikipedia.org
• *.wiktionary.org
• *.wikinews.org
• www.youtube.com
• www.flickr.com
• www.bbc.co.uk
• www.cnn.com
• www.forbes.com
• www.imdb.com
• www.ebay.com
• www.amazon.com

The second tier includes:

• www.mahalo.com
• www.blogger.com
• *.microsoft.com
• www.archive.org
• *.apple.com
• British Library (www.bl.uk)

Google is no doubt the undisputed king of search engines, but what impact will Wikia Search have on this area? Wales has long stated that three to five percent of the search engine market would be enough to sustain Wikia Search's business model. Let us know your thoughts on this new search engine.

Posted by Courtney Mills at 2:12 AM GMT