Wikipedia founder launches search engine

At Equilibrium we are as excited as the next person on the planet about the new project by the founder of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales is a maverick and a humanitarian. Since its inception, his wonderful creation of Wikipedia has become a universe in itself, with intelligent and insightful write-ups on practically everything. But now, Mr. Wales has decided to take on Google, Yahoo and the like as setting up an alternative with visible working structures by stating he his aim is to “to build a completely freely licensed, open- source search engine”.

Richard Waters at the Financial Times explores further into the Jimmy Wale’s latest project.

“An internet search engine that draws on human recommendations is due to make its first public appearance today, although even its founder warns that it will take some time to tell if the experiment can yield useful results.

Created by Jimmy Wales, the man behind online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, the search service will let users rate the relevance of results on a five-star system, then apply that information to shape future search results shown to others.

It will also draw on ideas from online social networking to try to establish reputations for its users and decide whose ratings should carry the most weight.

The success of Wikipedia, now one of the 10 most visited sites on the internet, has guaranteed huge interest in Mr Wales’s latest experiment, known as Wikia. In an interview, he said that his aim was “to build a completely freely licensed, open- source search engine” that would be far more transparent than Google and other existing services, which keep their algorithms for ranking search results a secret.

Sceptics have argued that Mr Wales’s approach risks exposing his service to “spammers” who try to trick search engines into promoting their sites. Mr Wales himself predicted that it would take “a minimum of two years” for his service to yield results that competed with existing engines”.

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