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Search Engine Will Use 'Wiki' Model

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By MIGUEL HELFT, The New York Times

Published: January 7, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO - When Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and called the site, which carried only a few articles then, a free encyclopedia, not many people took him seriously.

Nowadays, with more than 2 million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is an important, if not always reliable, reference for millions of Internet users.

Wales expects his new search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public today at www.wikia .com, to follow a similar trajectory.

"We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google-killer," Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a "Google-quality search engine," Wales said.

Like Wikipedia, Wales plans to rely on a "wiki" model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people's questions.

Wikia, a for-profit company independent of the Wikiamedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, plans to make money selling ads. The company, which also runs wiki sites on thousands of topics, has received $14 million, $10 million of that from Amazon.

The Wikia search engine will be an open-source project, whose programming code and data will be available to anyone, he said.

Dozens of companies have tried to offer alternatives to the big search engines. None has managed to attract a sizable audience so far.

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