An up-to-date look at free software and its makers

PROJECTS ON THE MOVE

Article from Issue 79/2007

Author(s): CARSTEN SCHNOBER AND MARTIN LOSCHWITZ

The people behind Wikipedia have launched the Search Wikia project, which hopes to compete with the major search engines through a mixture of large community and sound financial backing.

Ever since the Wikipedia free encyclopedia took off, creator Jimmy Wales has been on the lookout for new projects. Wales’ latest idea is a free, community-driven search engine that is inspired by Wikis, which he hopes will compete with the the global players like Google.
Why? “Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And it is currently broken,” according to Search Wiki, the Wiki-based search engine’s website. This might come as a surprise to satisfied users of Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines; however, the term “broken” does not refer to functionality, but rather to freedom, community, responsibility, and transparency.

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