Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13129-2517026,00.html

The Times December 23, 2006


Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google
James Doran, Tampa, Florida

Amazon.com is linked with project

Launch scheduled for early next year




Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is
set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes
will become a rival to Google and Yahoo!

Mr Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same
user-based technology as his open-access encyclopaedia, which was
launched in 2003.



The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the
Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for "rummaging
search".

Mr Wales told The Times that he was planning to develop a commercial
version of the search engine through Wikia Inc, his for-profit
company, with a provisional launch date in the first quarter of next
year.

Earlier this year he secured multimillion-dollar funding from
amazon.com and a separate cash injection from a group of Silicon
Valley financiers to finance projects at Wikia.

However, it is understood that amazon has also collaborated with Mr
Wales on the search engine project and is expected to lend its support
to the venture in the future.

Mr Wales, a 40-year-old former options trader, believes that, as the
popularity of Google has grown, obvious flaws in its search engine
technology have become apparent.

"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,"
he said.

Spammers and commercial ventures are also learning how to manipulate
Google's computer-based search, he added.

Mr Wales believes that Google's computer-based algorithmic search
program is no match for the editorial judgment of humans.

Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how
many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives
the material found by the search a ranking. Therefore, the first
result in any Google search is the website that has the most links
pointing to it.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia written by thousands of contributors
from around the world, known as "Wikipedians", using free open-source
software.

Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same
type of free software to create his search engine.

"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'," Mr Wales said. "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," he
added. "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."

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his
Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build
sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue
and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.

"The revenue model of search is advertising. Transparency in search,
therefore, is like transparency in news. If the quality is there
people will come."

Catching up with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft's MSN or even smaller
operators such as Ask.com will be a difficult challenge, Mr Wales
conceded.


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