Social search engines have become more and more popular this year with sites like Eurekster’s Swiki, Rollyo, Google Co-op Custom Search, PSS, Yahoo Search Builder, and MSN Search Macros, but Search Wikia brings in a new spin: it is an effort lead by the founder of Wikipedia.
Search Wikia, which was mistakenly called Wikiasari by some, is still a bit fuzzy on the details. It aims at being a community-built search engine, but appears to be in the very early stages (even the name appears to be up for grabs). Wikipedia certainly has a large audience, much in-part due to the search engines ranking it so high, so there’s a good chance they will have some success getting it off the ground. What will make Search Wikia different is that:
- It is built by a team of non-paid editors
- It hopes to become an open-source search engine with the success that other open-source programs have acheived
- It runs as a non-profit
- It may put it’s own highly successful organic search listings in other engines at risk because it is basically challenging the hand that feeds them.
As of now, Search Wikia is nothing to get excited about, but it will be interesting to keep an eye on it to see if it develops into something people will actually use. You can learn more by visiting the Search Wikia site.