Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia is now coming out strong with Wikia Search, an open source collaborative search website. It was first released in alpha months ago, but most recently some new features have been announced.
It isn’t a Google killer (yet), but it surely has the potential to one day become quite visible.
Wikia Search takes on the same principles that Wikipedia does to generate and moderate content, but here for your web search results. Search for any term and if you don’t like something you see from the results, you can alter it the way you’d like. You can:
- add a different website to the search results;
- change the description of sites that showed up;
- rate the results so you can vote on the links you think are most important for that specific search query;
- leave comments on a result found or even delete any of the links!
The database powering Wikia Search comes from Grub, a distributed search indexing system. At this moment it counts with 30 million indexed pages, but as Grub becomes more familiar and different users install it on their machines, these numbers can grow pretty quickly.
I like the concept of Wikia Search from the fact that eventually with enough user activity it can probably give better results than Google itself. Eventually though.. If you’re an early adopter and have time and interest to test new web projects, give it a try!