I’ve been meaning to talk about this new search engine which is to be released by the founder of the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, Jimmy Wales. The correct name of the search engine is “Search Wikia”, not Wikiasari as other people say. This is causing some commotion since people are already making assumptions as to what the new search engine will accomplish.

According to the information page, he says:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken. Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.

He even specified the kind of people he is looking for to aid him in building up his search engine:

I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.

Now the search engine has not been released yet, but people are already starting to make assumptions as to what this could lead to. I personally believe that instead of being a human-powered search engine like ChaCha with guides to help someone out, Search Wikia will have suggestions for common terms submitted by the users which are then shown to the visitors.

TechCrunch had put up a screenshot and some false assumptions that Search Wikia will be WikiSearch. WikiSearch is an already established search engine that is still in BETA, which conducts searches on the Wikipedia Encyclopedia and all the external sources listed in it. Michael Arrington still hasn’t figured out what Wikisearch does.

Furthermore, Search Wikia has also claimed that it is not a part of Amazon’s A9.com Search program, even though Amazon is a sponsor to Wikia Inc.

Search Wikia has gone through a couple of name changes, all of which can be found here. For a simple overview, the different names given to Search Wikia before are:

1. 3apes (directory style search engine)
2. Search Wikia
3. Wikia (later given to WikiCities)
4. Wikiasari (given to the project software)

So Wikiasari is not the correct name for the search engine, instead it is given to the project software. Since they gave the Wikia name to WikiCities (a wiki hosting service), they are naming this new search engine “Search Wikia”.

Technorati Tags: search engine, Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, Search Wikia, Wikiasari, ChaCha, WikiSearch, Amazon