Search Wikia to Debut by Year End?

The much- anticipated open source search engine being developed by Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales may be out in the fourth quarter of this year. Wales expects the search Wikia project to challenge the market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.

According to Wales, "The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now. Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken. Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that."

The project, run through Wikia Inc., seeks to use a similar model to the Wikipedia community-written and edited encyclopedia. Wales plans to offer tools and technology for programmers across the Internet, to collaborate on the development and testing of a search engine and make the results freely available.