Wikipedia Founder Plans Open-source Search Engine

Published: July 31, 2007, 2:12 pm

The building blocks for a community-driven internet search engine that will compete with the likes of as Google and Yahoo are being put in place according to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, US, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, had acquired Grub, a distributed web crawler that scours the web and indexes relevant sites, from California-based company Looksmart. Volunteers can download the Grub web crawler, which runs in the background on their PC, indexing web pages according to their content. The crawler will be used as the basis for Wikia's forthcoming search service. By contrast, search engines like Google run their own web crawlers and keep details of the way they work secret. Search results for Wikia's search service will be generated using an open-source search platform called Lucene. Wales said he is looking at options to enhance

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