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Wikia Brings Useful Ways To Search Together

Our search behavior will change is something better comes along. The Web 2.0 movement calls for a better kind of search--or at least, a wider variety of searches.

Wikipedia, as a way to search for specific information about something, is one new way. It can give you in-depth information about people, events, countries, anything you desire.

Which is why Wikia, the search project of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, makes sense. Why not let the community help write the search engine and decide which answers are most relevant? It seems to work for encyclopedic material, so what about all Web content? With Wikia, everyday users will play an active role in determining search results, able to vote on the relevance of each one by clicking thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Whether people will vote remains to be seen.

In stark contrast to the super-secretive search technologies guarded by Google and Yahoo, any programmer who earns credentials will be allowed to take a look at the engine's inner-workings and work on templates to improve it. Wales also hopes to receive cooperation and perhaps, partnership, from several second- and third-tier search engines that want to catch Google and Yahoo.

Read the whole story at Marketwatch »

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