Update: Search Wikia - The Open Source Search Engine
Published by Sunny on December 24th, 2006 in Internet, News - ViewsJimmy Wales, founder of the non-profit Wikipedia, is planning to launch a new search engine named Wikiasari by next year.
Wikiasari will be the third business division of Wikia, the company that Wales founded in 2005 and is now led by CEO Gil Penchina. The other two business units are the main Wikia wiki site itself, and the recently launched OpenServing product.
And contrary to bloggers claims, Amazon is not involved in the project, although it is a investor in it.
TechCrunch has obtained an exclusive screenshot of Wikiasari, which I am posting here.
Update: Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikia, confirms in his comment that the screenshot provided by Techcrunch, has nothing to do with the Wikiasari project.
Update 2: Wikiasari is now being called Search Wikia
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December 24th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
This will not be a “third business unit”. The screenshot TechCrunch is running has nothing to do with this project. The Wikia search project has nothing at all to do with Wikipedia.
December 24th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Why is TechCrunch lying ??
December 24th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that they were lying. It might be that they were just mis-informed !
December 24th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
Hmmm…
Is that SEO working for you ??
Or did Jimbo knew you personally :p
December 24th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
I didn’t mean to say that they were lying, but doesn’t it hurt their ethics ?
Won’t their readers loose faith in them ?
December 24th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
First off, TechCrunch might have received the wrong information, but not intended to lie. The second thing is, why must it be TechCrunch who is lying? Why not Jimbo? Maybe he’s not the real Jimbo, but just pretending here. Just my 2 cents.
December 24th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
@ Vincent,
Yes, I too had that doubt - whether this ‘Jimbo’ was an imposter. Infact, his comment came so fast ! Article was posted at 6.06pm, and Jimbo’s reply came at 6.10pm or so.
I had my doubts, and hence, I mailed him about it. After checking his IP address with the location mentioned in the Wiki, I was 99% sure that this was the guy ! And this was confirmed after I got Jimmy’s response to my email.
Also, Jimmy updated the Wikia Search site with the news about the Techcrunch article.
December 24th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
@ Thilak,
Not stating it as a rumour or an unconfirmed report is a chance that they took. If they have a huge faithful reader base, then I doubt many would leave the blog because of just one clumsy mistake.
December 25th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Yeah I agree with you. I’ve seen Jimbo and Jimmy Wales comment on similar stories on other blogs too.
December 25th, 2006 at 6:17 pm
gr8 thing that jimmy wales is the real jimmy …..there’s just one thing remaining- where did Tech Crunch get this news from and if it was from an non-reliable source why the heck did they publish it..
December 27th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
ISEN plans to have librarians catalog databases. Kind of like Wiki and ChaCha and other human powered search environments.
Check it out and please give me feedback.
http://www.isen.org
http://blog.isen.org
http://demo.isen.org
http://list.isen.org