Search Wiki to offer for-profit, community-filtered search

Can a community actively involved in the development of search make it better?  Jimmy Wales seems to think so….

At a crowd sponsored by Free Culture at NYU, Wales (Wikipedia’s founder) talked at length about Search Wikia, his vision for an open-source, for profit search engine.  According to an Infoweek report, the plan is to take Lucene and Nutch, two open source, Java based search engines from the Apache Jakarta Project, and allow programmers to copy, modify and redistribute code.  Others will lend feedback. 

“Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and therefore it is a fundamental part of culture and human society as a whole,” Wales told the crowd. 

After this initial phase, Wales sees a “trust network” of users developing to police the project–along the lines of Wikipedia.  Wales believes that relying on the collective wisdom of individuals is far better than what a machine can gather up about individual users. 

But what about spam??  Rather than protecting the community from the possibility of spam by protecting the code, Wales believes the “trust network” that builds through working on the project will overwhelm and take care of spammers.

“If you’re relying on people not knowing how the system works, you’ve got a big problem,” Wales said.

According to Wales, a beta of Search Wikia should launch in the next few months.