SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - 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. more..
