Wikia Search Officially Online and Seeking Contributors to Help
Build an Open Search Engine; Wales to Host Conference Call to Detail
Project's Mission and Current Status
SAN MATEO, Calif.--(Business Wire)--Wikia, Inc. (http://www.wikia.com/) the leading provider of
community resources for building and organizing free information on
every topic, today announced that co-founder Jimmy Wales' project to
create a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols
and human collaboration is now open to contributions from everyone.
The Wikia Search project, which is now live and can be found at
http://www.wikia.com/, officially launched in alpha form earlier today
following a brief private testing period. In addition to executing
basic search queries, users can also do traditional social networking
activities, such as creating a personal profile, adding friends,
sharing photos and managing privacy settings. Anyone is able to
discuss and rank search results, write and edit Mini Articles and
more.
"Today marks a significant, albeit initial step in our project to
build a search engine," said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman,
Wikia, Inc. "For the better part of the past year we've been working
in the background to get to the stage we're at today -- an
open-to-everyone alpha. We expect Wikia Search to be like fine wine in
that it will get better and better as time goes by and more and more
people contribute. I've said before that Internet search must be more
open and transparent and today marks a major milestone in our mission
to make it just that."
Search Infrastructure Open to All
The infrastructure delivering this alpha is also fully open,
meaning that anyone -- from home hobbyists, to entrepreneurs, to small
startups can leverage the technology to build their own search engine.
The open infrastructure includes a community organized compute
cluster, open access to indexes, downloads of compressed crawl and
index data, all built entirely on open source technologies including
Grub, Nutch, Hadoop, hBase, and Foowi.
In November 2007 more than 2,400 CPUs were donated to the Internet
Systems Consortium (http://www.isc.org/), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) public
benefit corporation dedicated to supporting the infrastructure of the
universal connected self-organizing Internet, for use to build a
completely open general search index. Wikia has worked closely with
the ISC to help organize and deploy the resources using various open
source technologies. The cluster will be community organized and
provide open access to all resources it produces including the
resulting indexes and compressed crawl data.
"We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the
future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and
Web that it builds upon," said Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and
Wikia Search Architect. "Search is becoming one of the most powerful
tools humankind has ever created -- only transparency and open
participation will protect these tools from abuse."
The tools enable every searcher to share and participate in simple
and familiar ways. The Wikia Search community is devoted to both
transparency and privacy -- meaning every ranking decision is open to
the public and absolutely nothing is automatically stored about any
user's executed search queries in order to protect privacy.
Later this morning, Wikia will host a conference call for anyone
in interested in learning more about the project. Details are as
follows:
-- What: Wikia Search Debrief
-- When: Monday, January 7, 2008 @ 9:00 am Pacific Time
-- Dial-in: 1-866-463-5401
-- Participant Code: 919779
-- Who: Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, CEO Gil Penchina and Wikia
Search Architect Jeremie Miller
To keep up with the latest developments around open source search
or to volunteer, please visit the community wiki at:
http://search.wikia.com.
A note on the difference between Wikia, Inc. and Wikipedia.org
Wikia, Inc., is an independently operated company and therefore
Wikia, Inc. and all of Wikia, Inc.'s subsequent projects, including
"Wikia Search" are in no way related to Wikipedia.org or The Wikimedia
Foundation.
About Wikia, Inc.
Since Wikia's launch in November 2004, more than 800,000 articles
on 3,000 topics have been created and edited by over 200,000
registered users in 70 languages.
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.
Bite Communications
Trevor Jonas, 415-365-0360 (press)
trevor.jonas@bitepr.com
Copyright Business Wire 2008
