• Information Week, Tuesday, February 6, 2007 11 AM

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has made no secret of the fact that he wants the public to beat Google at its own game. Speaking publicly for the first time about Wikia, his wiki search project, Wales shared his vision for the for-profit open-source search engine during a speech at New York University. "For developers, it would be kind of cool to say 'Google has 11 gazillion dollars, and we're going to get a bunch of people together on the Internet, and we're going to kick their butts' ", he said.

A wiki allows users to "add, remove and otherwise edit and change available content," according to Wikipedia, the Web's most popular wiki. Wales is bringing that wisdom to search: "Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and therefore, it is a fundamental part of culture and human society as a whole," he said. Wikia programmers will go through some sort of accreditation process, and will be able to test, research and modify its algorithms and then present them to the company, which decides whether to implement changes. The code will be open to all to copy, modify and redistribute. Non-programmers can rate search results and provide feedback, helping to remove the spam that plagues Google's results. Wales expects to have a beta running in a few months.

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