Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is attempting to fix Internet search by launching Wikia Search. Wales of Wikipedia fame has described the current state of Internet search as dominated by a few large companies operating under a cloak of secrecy with virtually no accountability for how results are served up or pages are ranked.
“The philosophical background here is that I’m a very big advocate of openness and transparency,” Wales told InternetNews.com. The best parts of the Web are largely absent from the proprietary protocols of the major search engines, he said. “My view here is that there’s an opportunity to change that.”
The infrastructure delivering Wikia Search is fully open, allowing anyone to leverage on the technology to build their own search engine. The open infrastructure includes a community organized compute cluster, open access to indexes, downloads of compressed crawl and index data, all built entirely on open source technologies including Grub, Nutch, Hadoop, hBase, and Foowi.
“We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon,†said Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and Wikia Search Architect.
Originally posted on January 7, 2008 @ 7:12 am
