Yesterday The Times reported that the founder of Wikipedia is launching a search engine to rival Google. Apparently much of the news which has been reported is apparently false according to the Search Wikia homepage. Techcrunch released some false screenshots of the Search Wikia project. Some other false news that was reported is that Amazon is highly involved in the project. Apparently Wikia has nothing to do with A9 or Amazon at all (except for the fact that Amazon in an investor in Wikia). Aside from the false news that has been circulating the blogosphere, the project looks promising.

According to the Search Wikia homepage, the search project will be utilizing Nutch and Lucene to create a new kind of search engine which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia was quoted in the times article:

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgements, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is builiding a community of trust that can do that.”
Supposedly, the project will be launching the first quarter of 2007. That is definitely a fast turnaround time. I’m excited to see what the end result is.