Wikipedia.com Owner Plans Launch Of New Search Engine Wikia To Rival Google

Wikipedia.com is planning on building a bigger, better community driven and developed search service that would eventually and hopefully rival major search engines such as MSN, Google and Yahoo.

The name of the commercial start up is Wikia.com. Wikia for this purpose, has acquired Grub, a pioneering web crawler from another search rival Looksmart, which will drive the forthcoming Wikia engine to search and scour the web to index and retrieve relevant web sites.

Wikia, which in the past has assisted “groups” to set up 1000’s of Wikipedia type sites on specialized topics ranging from: books to entertainment to travel, plans to develop the site based on an “open source” web search service utilizing the help and use of volunteers.

The new Wikia search engine, which is geared to launch near the end of 2007, will use the combination of computer driven algorithms as well as human assisted editing when the public version of the site is
launched.