Wikipedia Founder Plans Community Search To Compete With Google

  • July 30, 2007
Jimmy Wales, founder of the community-written online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has his eyes on a new goal: Search Wikia, a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.

Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, a distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under open source license for the first time in four years. He made the announcement at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland. Wikia is a for-profit company Wales founded in 2004 to enable community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia.

"We've had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space," Wales said. "It's not a good thing that we are getting search results from a handful of very large players and we have no idea how they are generated."

LookSmart is also providing text and display ads in Wikia's wiki communities and will also provide ads on the Search Wikia site, Wales said.

Wikia will sell ads using CPC and CPM models. Unsold inventory will be filled by ads from LookSmart's distributed ad network.

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