Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is birthing a new project — a community-driven “Google-killer” search engine. The project is an outgrowth of the Wikia camp [the for-profit company that Wales is chairman of], not a Wikipedia project [the separate community-driven encyclopedia he co-founded]. Wikia recently completed a funding round with Amazon, which is part of the Seattle “connection.”
According to Wales, “There are a lot of things that we’ve learned in the wiki world on how to get communities involved and engaged to build trusted networks in communities. A lot of the people who have tried to do this in the past have stumbled not on technical issues but on community issues … dmoz [The Open Directory] was too closed … that was their response because of the pressure of spammers … others have thought in terms of ranking algorithms. That’s not the right approach. The right approach allows for open dialog and debate and discussion.”
How would a Wiki-like search engine work?
Exactly how people can be involved is not yet certain. If I had to speculate about it, I would say it’s several of those things, not just community involved with rating URLs but also community rating for whole web sites, what to include or not to include.
Wikia’s initial round was $4 million from a variety of angels. The amount of the second round of investiture from Amazon was not announced.
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