Update: Wikia search engine gains a Web crawler

Wikia's project to develop an open source search engine got another boost with its acquisition of the Grub distributed Web crawler, the company announced Friday.

Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart and released it under an open source license, adding a significant component to Search Wikia, scheduled to debut in this year's fourth quarter.

The Search Wikia project seeks to create a search engine based on open source search protocols and human collaboration, drawing from the concept of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, which is written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators.

As such, it will provide a better search experience than the ones offered by commercial, proprietary search engines like those from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, said Jimmy Wales, Wikia's co-founder and chairman, and Wikipedia founder.

However, people shouldn't expect Search Wikia's first version to deliver on this lofty goal. "When I opened Wikipedia with only three articles in it, it was a pretty bad encyclopedia," Wales said. "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."

Wikia, which has about 35 full-time employees, is developing its own relevancy technology to rank search results, he said. At this point, it's not clear whether at launch Search Wikia will offer only general Web searching or if it will have specialty engines for things such as images and news.

Visually, Search Wikia will have the standard search-engine interface. "The differences will be that at various points all along that search process, there'll be opportunities for people to engage with the community and join and participate in the construction of the search results," Wales said.

Since Search Wikia's announcement in December, an increasing number of organizations, such as search and online advertising player LookSmart, have expressed interest in the project, Wales said. In the coming months, Wikia will provide more details about third-party partnerships and support.

"A lot of second-tier [search] players understand that competing with Google directly as independent proprietary projects, they'll never catch up because they don't have enough individual resources. But by banding together using open source software, they can effectively compete with Google and improve their services that way," Wales said.

In fact, Wales believes that supporting Search Wikia would be in the best interest not only of second-tier search engines but also of search leaders, including Google. Search isn't a "defensible business" because it's very easy for people to switch among providers, so just like Google unseated AltaVista, another large competitor could emerge, he said. Thus, democratizing search in the way Search Wikia will attempt to do is a good thing for Google.