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Wikia : future of Internet Search
:: 27 July, 2007
(www.wikia.com) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, today unveiled major next steps in its work to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). In a morning keynote address, Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed business models and his vision for building the LAMP stack for search, which can be done by assembling open-source technologies.
Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK) and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at: http://www.grub.org.
“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system. By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.
“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer, LookSmart. “We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here.”
To keep up with the latest developments around open source search or to volunteer, please visit the community wiki at: http://search.wikia.com
News Inside News:
Wikia details plans for search rival to Google-
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Friday he is putting the building blocks in place for a community-developed Web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites.
"If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."
Wikia -- which has helped groups set up thousands of Wikipedia-style sites on topics ranging from popular TV shows to specialist health or travel -- plans to develop an "open source" Web search service with the help of volunteers.
Wales founded the anyone-can-edit Wikipedia encyclopedia, a noncommercial project that is one of the Web's most popular sites. He also co-founded the Wikia ad-supported network of self-edited wiki sites. However, the two organizations have no formal ties.
The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search site toward the end of 2007, Wales said in a phone interview.
Human editors would help untangle terms with multiple meanings, such as palm, which can refer to location like Palm Beach, or generic topics like trees or handheld computers.
Search results are generated via another open-source software project called Lucerne. Wales said he is looking at options to enhance Lucerne, but would not detail his plans.
Grub was originally an open source project that was freely available to software makers to enhance as long as they shared any improvements they made. Wikia has acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd., which had halted work on the project.
Wikia plans to open up Grub to other developers to make improvements or to incorporate the crawler into other sites.
Terms of the deal between Wikia (http://wikia.com) and LookSmart (http://search.looksmart.com/) were not disclosed.
However, last week, San Francisco-based LookSmart, which provides banner and search-based online advertising to Web sites, said it had agreed to supply advertising across Wikia's network of wiki sites. Wikia had been using Google's advertising service.
"We have interest from a lot of other commercial players in the search space," said Wales.
Grub relies on distributed computing technology to power the crawler. Computer users who download the software at http://www.grub.org/ can share computer processing time when they are not using their machines, cutting the cost of Wikia developing its own network of computers to crawl the Web.
Open search is part of Wikia's broader push to promote the spread of free content publishing on the Web. Wales' objective is to make explicit the editorial judgments involved in modern Web search systems. Proprietary search systems such as Google Inc. keep secret key details of how their search systems work to prevent spamming and for competitive reasons
Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.
Active areas of focus:
Social Lab - sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
Distributed Lab - projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
Semantic Lab - Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
Standards Lab - formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.
About Wikia, Inc.
Since Wikia’s launch in November 2004, more than 750,000 articles on 2,700 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000 registered users in 70 languages. In addition to working on open-source search, Wikia is currently home to several computer programming-related wikis such as, WikiaPerl at http://perl.wikia.com , the Visual Basic Wiki at http://vb.wikia.com , and the PHP Wiki at http://php.wikia.com .
Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.
Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.
About LookSmart, Ltd.
LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK) is an online advertising and technology company that provides relevant solutions for advertisers, publishers and consumers. LookSmart offers advertisers targeted, pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising and banners via its consumer Web properties and a monitored ad distribution network; a customizable set of private-label solutions for publishers; and vertical search sites and web tools for consumers. LookSmart is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.looksmart.com or call 415-348-7500.
Release link: http://search.wikia.com
Tags: Internet Search , open-source search , Open Source Convention (OSCON) , LookSmart , algorithmic black box , Wikia project , google ,
