SAN FRANCISCO - Wikipedia is all set to unleash a rival to Google's ubiquitous search engine in an effort to put the power back into the hands of the publishers rather than search engines.
Speaking at a software developers' conference in Oregon, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales revealed that he has already bought an innovative web crawler known as Grub, which will help the new search engine in indexing websites. Wales said that the search engine will be an "open source" project which will be put up with the help of a number of volunteers.
He added the project will help overturn the current dominance of search engines and will help quality publishers gain importance. "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. I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome", he said.
Wales revealed that the search engine project could be released for public usage by the end of this year and will make use of both human editing and computer algorithms to index websites. Search results will be displayed with the help of Lucerne, which is another open source software. Wales said that his company is looking at ways to enhance the software further.
While the project will be launched on a smaller note, Wales revealed that ultimately he wants the search engine to compete successfully against other search engine giants such as Yahoo or Google. "Basically we're trying to build the complete search engine infrastructure, the whole package and Grub is one of the pieces of the puzzle. Once we're done we do anticipate competing directly with Google and Yahoo", he said.
