Wikia Search to offer first peek next week

Wikia Search, a community-driven search engine, will get its first public preview on 7 January, according to co-founder Jimmy Wales.

In an email sent to the Wikia Search mailing list on 24 December, Wales wrote that he aims to make the initial version of the search tool available in alpha form. "We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken," he wrote.

Wikia Search, which aims to allow users to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, will have open-source search algorithms and APIs. The search platform includes the Grub search project, acquired by Wikia in July last year, which employs user-donated distributed processing power to crawl the web.

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Wales, who also founded user-generated online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, hopes Wikia Search will eventually rival other search companies, by making the way in which search results are arrived at more "transparent".

"The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses," said Wales in July. "Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgement of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box."

Wikia Search is part of Wikia Inc, a wiki-hosting company co-founded by Wales.