Based on a similar philosophy behind Wikipedia, which lets users collaboratively write and edit information on the site, Search Wikia will rely on a community of users to determine the relevancy of web pages and keywords by resorting and editing search results and moving more relevant sites higher up on the page.
Wales said it could take up to three years of user-edits for the site to catch up with search rivals Google and Yahoo.
Wales said Search Wikia is based on the open source search infrastructures of sites Lucene and Nutch and is be backed by several technology companies, including Amazon.com.
Wales told the BBC he was moving into the search engine arena because “search systems for the net were broken.” Wales attributed this dysfunction to the fact that most search engines “lacked freedom, community, accountability and transparency,” and that using algorithms to rank web pages is an inaccurate method of determining the quality of websites.
Search Wikia will be overseen by Wales’ Wikimedia Foundation, with a tentative launch date in early 2007.
Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001. Based on a special type of website called a “wiki,” the site enables collaboration among its community of users, who make thousands of changes to the site’s content on the hour.
At the time of this posting, the term “Search Wikia” had not yet been added to Wikipedia’s database.