A new venture to begin a search engine based on open source principles should begin before the end of this year, says Wikipedia founder and CEO Jimmy Wales.
He was speaking at the Digital Freedom Exposition, hosted by the University of the Western Cape yesterday.
Wales said the open source search engine would be a project under his new "Wikia" commercial venture, which is being run separately from his non-profit Wikipedia open content encyclopaedia.
Wales termed the search engine as being "a radical shift in the search industry", because it will allow its algorithm to be open for anyone to use, modify and improve.
Internet search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, use algorithms to search out the keywords entered by users to bring up the matching results. These algorithms are closely guarded secrets and are changed often.
Trying to work out the algorithms has spurred an Internet marketing boom, with search engine optimisation companies continuously attempting to see if they can predict them in order to channel hits to their clients' Web sites. The industry has termed this process "chasing the algorithm".
Fun trying
"I don't know if we can take on Google with a small band of people, but it will be fun trying," Wales said.
He said an announcement about who the technologists will be to develop this new search engine would be made soon.
The Wikia Web site says Internet search is "broken" for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: "lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency".
It says a new search engine is needed, that relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot.
During his speech, Wales said another project Wikia would undertake is to publish open books, other than encyclopaedias, and other types of community.
"The sheer volume of articles published on Wikipedia alone is far more than traditional publishing houses can handle and that is where the Internet comes in."
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