Jimmy Wales’ Wikia Search will open to the public next week with an eye toward improving search by letting users tweak search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia.

Wales, the founder of Wikipeida, announced that the project would enter public beta on January 7. The goal, he said, is to reduce the “bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic.”

The public release should be considered alpha, Wales

said. “We want to run by the system with help from humans to complain about what is broken.”

Collaborative Search Engine

Wikiia Search was originated in July, when Wales announced that his company, Wikia, had acquired a distributed-search project called Grub and was releasing it under an open-source license.

“The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News