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Wales stressed that it was still a preliminary version, searching only 50 to 100 million internet pages. That is a fraction of the data holdings of competitors Google, Yahoo and MSN. As with Wikipedia, Wikia’s operators rely on user participation: users are intended to evaluate and supplement search results.
Wales recently explained his initiative to weekly newspaper Die Zeit by saying that all search engines are closed systems, each owned by a company. As a “citizen of the internet,” he said, one must ensure “transparency and openness.” Unlike Wikipedia, however, the search engine is a commercial project. It is operated by Wikia.com, a company Wales founded in 2004. The search engine is to be financed through advertising, in which volunteer contributors are not intended to participate.
As an example of participation, Wales said that if several web surfers mark a page as spam, it would no longer appear in result lists. Wikia is also open-source software. Its source code, unlike Google’s, is freely available. Users with programming knowledge can therefore see how search results are generated and further develop the software themselves. In December, search-engine operator Google announced that it would test a new knowledge database called “Knol,” directly competing with Wikipedia.
