Wikia acquires Grub in open source search project
by Jan Harris
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Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is planning to go head to head with Google and Yahoo with a community-developed web search service. The open-source search engine will be developed with the help of volunteers.
At a conference of software developers in Oregon Wales revealed that Wikia has acquired web crawler ‘Grub’, which will allow the planned search engine to scour the web to index relevant sites.
Wales, who founded the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, hopes the new service will wrest some power from search companies such as Google, and strengthen the position of publishers.
Wikia helps groups establish Wikipedia-style sites on a whole range of topics. The sites are self-edited and supported by ads. Although they share a common founder, Wikia and Wickipedia have no formal ties.
A public version of the new Wikia search site, combining computer-powered algorithms and human-assisted editing, will be launched towards the end of 2007.
The search results are provided through an open-source software project called Lucerne.
Wales plans to make the Wikia search service available to other websites and smaller publishers. A custom version of the service can be installed which points website visitors only to links with a specific site.
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