Wikia Inc. Buys Grub

London (dBTechno) – Wikia Inc, is one step closer to offering a competitive search engine to Google and Yahoo.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the hugely popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has outlined his plans for his new start up company and the new search engine.

Wikia Inc has bought Grub, a distributed Web crawler, from LookSmart Ltd for an undisclosed amount and released it under an open-source license.

Based on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, the Search Wikia project aims to develop a search mechanism based on open-source and human input.

“When I opened Wikipedia with only three articles in it, it was a pretty bad encyclopedia,” Wales told the Washington Post. “That’s where we’re going to be in December with the search engine. We’ll tell people upfront: ‘It’s not very good yet.’ But we’ll open it up to get feedback and community involvement to help us make it better.”

Wikipedia is written and maintained by thousands of volunteer contributors from all over the world.

According to IDG News Service, Wales says the new search product will provide an improved search experience over those offered by commercial, proprietary search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Smaller less-known search projects are encouraged to join the new Wikia project, Mr Wales said. “A lot of second-tier players understand that competing with Google directly as independent proprietary projects, they’ll never catch up,” he said. “By banding together using open-source software, they can effectively compete with Google and improve their services.”

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