Last Friday, Wikipedia founder and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia had acquired Grub, a Web crawler that utilizes unused computer processing time on users’ computers to crawl the Internet’s pages. Users can download the Grub software to take part in this, which allows Wikia to essentially build a network of crawlers at a more cost-effective price.
"If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland.
The impending Wikia search engine has been nicknamed Wikiasari in the past, but that name seems to have lost its buzz. Regardless, the search engine will attempt to mesh together the strengths of strong algorithms and human editors to produce the best search results. Humans would enable the search engine to better distinguish the intent behind vague and/or broad search terms.
Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd., which also partnered with Wikia two weeks ago to provide the network of wikia sites with banner and search-based online advertising.
Wales indicated that he hopes that the Wikia search service would eventually be able to cater to specific Web sites and smaller publishers. He hopes that they would be able to install a custom version of the search engine on their sites to give results that point only to a designated site.
The Wikia search service is eyeing an unveiling towards the end of 2007, according to Wales.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070727/wr_nm/chang_wikia_search_dc;
_ylt=AttBRzNdtjqxvtNKDHJEoJP6VbIF
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/27/wikia-acquires-distributed-web-
crawler-grub/
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