Updated 6 January 2007
There has been extensive coverage of Wikia Inc.'s project to develop a "new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot". (Wikia Inc. is a for-profit company co-founded by Jimmy Wales, that lives alongside, but is discrete from, Wikipedia.) This updatable list of links to some of the stories, annotated by Wikia Inc., provides the flavour, and this 23 December 2006 statement by Jimmy Wales summarise the Search Wikia vision. You can also join a mailing list (busy, with plenty of high level contributions, but there is a digest option) about the project, from where you can find, for example, this more detailed and sceptical assessment of the prospects for the project, by Danny Sullivan, or this lucid 3 January 2007 piece by Jimmy Wales summarising his views on how the project might take shape. Currently (6/1/2007) there is interest in an Open Source "distributed peer-to-peer web-indexing application" called Yacy. If I were Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft, would I be worried? Not yet. But I think people who use search for primarily narrow intellectual pursuits rather than in areas where there is a lot of active commerce, are maybe unaware of the extent to which spam and porn on the web damage the value of conventionally obtained search results. Search Wikia would, amongst other things, aim to solve this problem.
See also this 1 February 2007 link to, and extract from a New Scientist interview with Jimmy Wales.
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