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A new competitor for Google, Yahoo! and MSN?

12. March 2007

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, has announced at a news conference in Tokyo that Wikia Inc., the lucrative company owned by himself, will enter a new market and soon build an open-source search engine.

Wikia Inc. was set up in October 2004 with the objective to create freely hosted wiki communities. At this time, there was already a search engine project named Wikiasari but it became inactive during 2005.

Recently, the idea re-emerges with the possibility of a wiki-based search engine at the end of 2006 and forces Wikia Inc. to re-launch his last Wikiasari under the name of “Search Wikia”.

It will be collaborative work where everybody can contribute. The aim is to get 5 percent of the search market. With this open-source search engine, we expect more spamdexing (achieving a higher rank for a website even if it has nothing to do with the search topic), because people can easily get the search algorithm and then make all necessary changes to optimise websites in order to be on SEO's pole position. But as this might be true - a solution is already evolving: the creation of spam-website blacklists.

Is Google’s monopoly finished? Will we see a “new way of search” emerge?

See the official website for more information about this search engine.

Article by Guillaume Rembert