People Search Digest

Recently, it seems like “Wiki” (from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.com) has taken on a second definition as a verb - much like “Google” has. When someone has a question, they are either told to “google” or “wiki” it. On January 6, Wikia Search launched live in its first publicly accessible form. Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales, backed the new venture for the company. The new search engine is an open source tool that is conducive to collaboration. Wikipedia and Wikia Search actually operate independently and are unrelated except for the involvement of Wales, who had announced this project last year as an alternative to Google.

The brand spanking new Wikia Search sets itself apart in the search engine world by following the popular social networking model. It allows users to create profiles, add friends, photos, and manage privacy preferences, while providing traditional search capabilities. Users have the ability to start or participate in discussions about search rankings and write small articles about search terms. However, queries are protected and no user search data is retained.

Wikia works with the Internet Systems Consortium, which is a nonprofit organization supporting Internet infrastructure. The engine will be community organized and provide open access to all resources it produces including indexes and compressed crawl data by using open technologies like Brub, Nutch, Hadoop, hBase, and Foowi. The search engine itself will rely heavily on user participation, so it encourages users to comment liberally through articles, feedback, and by reporting errors.

Wikia Search definitely seems promising, and it’s founded on a completely open foundation, which must drive the future of search. It will be interesting to see the outcome of Wikia Search as it accumulates more users, and thus, more data.