Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 19, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In an interview with the weekly newspaper «Die Zeit», Wales said he wanted to offer a search engine with «Wikia» whose algorithm would be accessible to everyone. Google, by contrast, treats the formula for calculating search results on the web as a trade secret.
Wales, who founded the company Wikia.com in 2004, said that «as a citizen of the Internet» one had to «ensure transparency and openness». «At the moment
Jimmy Wales, creator of the Internet encyclopaedia “Wikipedia”, wants to compete with Google (archive).
however, all search engines are closed systems, each owned by a company. And these companies decide how they evaluate websites», Wales told «Zeit». At Wikia, registered users are to evaluate search results and thereby rank them up or down. The offering is to be financed through advertising revenue, although the volunteer contributors are not to participate in it.
At the beginning of the week, Google announced that it would itself build a kind of online encyclopaedia with «Knol» and thus wanted to compete with the Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia. So far, Google rates Wikipedia entries very highly and frequently shows Wikipedia articles among the top results of a web search
