Search Wikia Labs
Update: Nick Lewis points out that Wikia's attempt to mix community-driven with for-privane-profit is likely to fail. Which is fine as OpenZuka's been planning on world domination all along. Steve Anderson noted the need for a nonprofit alternative months ago. Still, the key part of opening up algorithms, shared by OpenZuka, is worth keeping an eye on.
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia
Building a new open global search engine.
Our Four Organizing Principles (TCQP) - the future of Internet Search must be based on:
1. Transparency - Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
2. Community - Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
3. Quality - Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
4. Privacy - Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.
Active areas of focus:
Social Lab - sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
Distributed Lab - projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
Semantic Lab - Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
Standards Lab - formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.
It's beginning to look like OpenZuka could fit into an ecology of open source search solutions (that is, provide a specific piece, such as distributed processing) as Search Wikia's very compatible, indeed overlapping, goals all got a lot closer to happening, with this announcement of 2007 July 27:
http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia_OSCON
Jimmy Wales and Wikia Release Open Source Distributed Web Crawler Tool
LookSmart provides search technology assets to enable distributed web crawling, others join growing list of organizations looking to make open source search a reality.
Portland, Oregon, July 27, 2007 - Wikia, Inc. (www.wikia.com) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, today unveiled major next steps in its work to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). In a morning keynote address, Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed business models and his vision for building the LAMP stack for search, which can be done by assembling open-source technologies.
Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK) and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at: http://www.grub.org.
“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system. By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.
“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer, LookSmart. “We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here.”
