Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia has recently released a new open source project.  The new project is supposed to be a search engine that an open source community builds, similar to Wikipedia.  The open source tool used for the platform is Nutch and the index of web pages that revolve around Wikia currently was put together by Grub, a web crawler that Wikia acquired.

While there was a lot of hype built around Wikia’s search, the company insists that it is merely an alpha release and the search result quality will be low initially.  Michael Arrington’s review did not go favorably for the product, thus causing Wales to respond personally.  The debate is that Wikia was supposed to be a Google killer, but the alpha does not look impressive.

Release early, release often.

It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

-Jimmy Wales [comment on TechCrunch post linked above]

Just for reiteration, the difference between Wikia and Google upon early release is that the founders of Google found out how to download and index the Internet before releasing their search engine as mentioned in the book, The Google Story.  Wikia simply released with low quality to finally let the open source community flood in, go to work on the site, and create quality search results.  I first wrote about Wikia in December 2006 when the name was speculated to be Wikiasari.

I’ll hold off on reviewing Wikia Search in depth because it still has a lot of growing to do.  Wikipedia didn’t become the biggest open source encyclopedia a day after it went into public alpha, but now its the #9 most visited web site according to Alexa.  I’m not in the position to judge anything just yet.  This blog post is to just make people aware that the release is officially open.

Yesterday around 10:18PM, an anonymous friend donated $286,800 to Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E., the arm of fund collection for Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’ Wikipedia. As of right now Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. has raised over $709,000. Since Wikipedia is a non-profit open-source website, all donations are appreciated. According to Alexa, Wikipedia is the #12 ranked website, so the server costs are obviously very high for Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Wikipedia “receives over 2000 page requests per second. More than 100 servers have been set up to handle the traffic.” Less than a quarter of Wikipedia’s traffic is accounted for by non-registered users who are not likely to be article contributors. In the 4th quarter of 2005, the cost to keep Wikipedia online was $321,000 with server costs accounting for roughly 60%.

About 5 days ago, I had found a post on StartupSquad about an upcoming search engine called Wikiasari was being developed by Jimmy Wales. StartupSquad and Pulse 2.0 wrote that Amazon was involved with the project development. A comment by Jimmy Wales himself on our post pointed out that this information was inaccurate. Then similar incorrect information was written on TechCrunch and Mashable.

Now that I know that Jimmy Wales reads our blog, I’d like to personally congratulate him on the large donation that was given to the Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E.

[Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, image source Wikipedia]
[Edit: Please note that my source has a bit of incorrect information. Judging by the comment by Mr. Wales in this blog post, it appears that Amazon is not a part of this project.]

Wikiasari, a combination of the Hawaii words, ‘wiki’ and ‘asari’ which mean ‘quick ‘and ‘rummaging search’ respectively is the name of a new upcoming search engine that will be developed by Jimmy Wales, a co-founder of Wikipedia. The new search engine team is aiming to become a rival against Google and Yahoo!.

The new search initiative is inspired partially by the flaws found in Google search by Wales. “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” stated Wales. Wales had also mentioned that Google is notorious for being a victim of spammers who know how to manipulate the system and have their sites placed high in the page results.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” added Mr Wales. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.”

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” added Wales. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

According to StartupSquad, Wales is planning to utilize similar technology as Wikipedia that involves open source information input by users. The search engine is expected to be released early 2007.
[source: Times Online UK]