Wikisari: the new Google Rival on the Way

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is about to launch a search engine intended to rival to Google and Yahoo. Wikiasari, which uses the same user-generated system as Wikipedia, may launch as early as the first quarter of 2007. It will be a for-profit project launched by Jimmy’s company Wikia, making money from ads. “Wiki” as we all know by now, means “quick” in Hawaiian;“asari” means “rummaging search” in Japanese.  Everyone seems to be getting the name wrong...

Wales says Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet and it is currently broken. In his opinion, 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 says his new project will change all that.

Following Wikipedia social search logic, Wales is betting on the editorial judgment of people to out perform the algorithmic searches of Google, Yahoo and others that are so Web 1.0. Wales is quoted in the UK’s The Times, “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.” 

Want to help? Jimbo is  looking for community members to continue the development of Wikiasari.  If you'd like to help build people-powered search results and an open-source alternative for web search, join the mailing list.

Mashable isn't overly enthusiastic about the venture and points out that Social search has been tried a number of times and failed, largely due to a lack of motivation on the part of the “editors” and the fact that Google is generally considered to deliver high quality results.  Andrew Lih suggests that rather than reinventing the wheel with another search engine, Wales might have better luck using a hybrid of Google’s algorithmic search, beefed up with the external links from Wikipedia, Wikitravel, etc. Lih thinks its a problem to depend purely on human-oriented processes for recommending links for a search engine result. While humans might be good for the long-term horizon, spidering the Internet gets the fastest changing information.

It was reported that Amazon was involved with this venture but Jimmy Wales says they are nothing more than a "valued invester," and that Wikisaria has nothing do do with A9 or Amazon.

A notice on the Wikia Main Page says, "Welcome to Search Wikia, a project to create the search engine that changes everything.  This site is currently being completely reworked, until December 27th."  I, for one, can't wait to see what they come up with.