Wikia Launches Its First Open Source Search Engine

Wikipedia's founder Jimma Wales today unveiled an alpha version Wikia, this project is a new opensource search engine.

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low...--According to Wikia.

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the "miniarticles" that appear at the top of popular search terms.

You can try it out here.

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Google Knol -Wikipedia Like Service

Yesterday Google announced that they are working on a new online publishing tool called Knol.

Google quoted :

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.


Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

And its sure that Google is making a way to compete with Wikipedia and to dominate the market of internet knowledge.

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