Wikia search engine to go live on Monday
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Search Wikia, the widely awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut on Monday, with the bet that an open-source, community-driven effort can disrupt and reshape this Google-dominated market.However, people who give the search engine a test drive on Monday shouldn&#39;t expect a Google killer, because they will be looking at a project that is at a very early stage and will need participation from volunteers to grow and be refined, Wales said.In that sense,&#160;Search Wikia&#160;is expected to develop in a similar fashion to&#160;Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators who have expanded it and improved it organically over the years.&quot;Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It&#39;s a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it&#39;s in its very early days,&quot; Wales said.Still, Wales fully expects Search Wikia to eventually be a better alternative to commercial search engines from the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com.&quot;I don&#39;t know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I&#39;d say at least two years,&quot; he said.People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results.Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends&#39; actions.Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a &quot;mini article&quot; at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.Below the &quot;mini article&quot; will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time.Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. &quot;That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results,&quot; he said.Those who try to abuse the system for, say, search engine spamming purposes, are bound to be quickly noticed by administrators and other community members, and they will swiftly be blocked and banned, Wales said.Initially, people will only be able to do general Web searches, but the plan is to add tabs for image and news searches later. Likewise, Search Wikia&#39;s index will only contain links to English-language Web sites at first, but more languages will be supported progressively. &quot;The goal is to be in as many languages as possible as fast as possible,&quot; Wales said.Improvements to Search Wikia will be added on a rolling basis. &quot;It&#39;s release early, release often. We want to be constantly updating the software every day,&quot; he said. Search Wikia will be supported by advertising revenue, but it hasn&#39;t yet been determined how.Search Wikia&#39;s software and data, including its Web crawl index, will be freely available to anyone wishing to use them to create their own engine or search application, Wales said.&quot;With an open-source search engine, lots of people will download and use our software to compete with the major players. We think we have a chance of actually restructuring the industry to be much more competitive,&quot; Wales said.In the past, Wales has said that search isn&#39;t a &quot;defensible business&quot; because it&#39;s easy for users to switch among providers, so democratizing search is a good thing for all companies in this market. What is a defensible business is the ad brokerage that rides on top of the search engine activity, and that&#39;s where a company such as Google should focus, according to Wales.Search Wikia and Wikipedia operate under two organizations that were both founded by Wales: Wikia Inc. is a commercial, for-profit company with about 40 full-time employees. Wales is its board chairman. The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, is a nonprofit entity, and Wales is its chairman emeritus.Wikia Inc. and Wikimedia operate independently. Search Wikia is one of several projects and services at Wikia Inc.
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Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching an Internet search engine based on the same voluntary collaboration that drives the online encyclopedia.
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Google this morning announced a test project it's calling "Knol," which will comprise a collection of authoritative articles on various subjects. The project is currently invitation-only, and represents only a minor threat to Wikipedia, Scott Gilbertson argues.
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The on-line collaboration responsible for  Wikipedia plans to build a search engine to rival those of  Google Inc.  and Yahoo Inc. , the founder of  the popular Internet encyclopaedia said on Thursday.
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Search headlines from around the web, December 27, 2004.
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The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O plans to   officially launch on Tuesday its new Windows Live Search   engine, a pillar in its strategy to topple market leader Google   GOOG.O and wrestle away billions of dollars worth of online   advertising.
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What's new in search? Found in the forums: Is SEO Necessary? Top Ten Search Factors 2007; Bringing SEM In-house; and more.
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Microsoft will introduce its long-awaited Internet search engine on Thursday, a person knowledgeable about the announcement said.
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Is Google launching its wiki and presentation services this week? All signs point to yes.
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After an annoyingly long series of beta releases, say hello to MediaWiki 1.3.0! Everyone running the beta releases is _strongly_ recommended to upgrade to the current code. MediaWiki is the collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and other projects. It&apos;s designed to handle a large number of users and pages without imposing too rigid a structure or workflow.   This release includes a security fix: the 1.3.0 beta releases may be vulnerable to a PHP inclusion attack if include files are exposed and you have allow_url_fopen and register_globals on (this is the default configuration in PHP 4.1.x, but register_globals is off by default in 4.2.x and later).  Note that while MediaWiki through 1.1 required register_globals to be on, 1.2 and 1.3 *do not*. If you have register_globals on, you should turn it off unless you are absolutely sure you require it for some other package. See http://php.net/register_globals for general information.   Release notes: http://sf.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=34373&release_id=259965  Download: http://prdownloads.sf.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.0.tar.gz?download  Wiki admin help mailing list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l  Bug report system: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=34373&atid=411192  Play "stump the developers" live on IRC: #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net
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Search Engine News Weekly Report - Clusty, Yahoo, and MSN  The end of September and beginning of October has seen some changes in search engine news and the addition of a new search engine into the second tier search mix - Clusty. Additionally, MSN is planning on including search in their ...
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A web giant is born as Yahoo incorporates. And on the seventh day, they rested. Compiled by Tony Long.
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Search headlines from around the web, December 29, 2004.
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Links to the week's topics from search engine forums across the web: TrueLocal Launches Canadian Local Search Engine - The Video Void: Where Are All The AdSense Video Ads? - Here Comes Social Media Optimization? - Google Apps for Your Domain, and more.
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Links to this week's topics from search engine forums across the web: Live From SES Sweden - AdSense verses Affiliate Programs - Google Is Now Indexing Pop-ups - Redirects, Frames And Cloaking - Do You Avoid Content Targeted Listings? - Image Ads On Google Adwords - The Right way to Count Links?
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SAN FRANCISCOâThe co-founders of early search engine and portal Excite.com are bringing a new concept to the Web: the wiki as an application development platform.