Wales speaks out: Wikiasari 'people-powered' search engine

JIMBO WALES: "Search Wikia, a project to create the search engine that changes everything":

Reporters and bloggers note: Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This has nothing to do with A9, Amazon, etc.
Help me out, spread the word. I am looking for people to continue the development of wikiasari. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search. Jimbo Wales 23:24, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Update:: The TechCrunch story is also wrong. This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.

Here, we will change all that.

There have been some amazing projects in recent years which have matured now to the point that a new alternative is possible. Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new.

Nutch and Lucene now provide the background infrastructure that we need to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.

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