Wikipedia Looks to Conquer Search Next

The company behind Wikipedia plans to shake up the search market by offering a collaborate search platform allowing users to improve upon the system much like they do with the popular encyclopedia Web site.

At a news conference Thursday in Tokyo, Wikipedia founder and chairman Jimmy Wales said Wikia -- the commercial face of Wikipedia -- plans to take as much as five percent of the search market.

Wales criticized search leaders Yahoo and Google for keeping their search technologies under wraps and not letting users have a say in the process. He claims that the constant improvement of the technology would also give it a leg up on the increasing problem of search result spam.

The software used by Wikipedia is made available freely to other sites as long as they provide a link back to the company, and Wikia could arguably be credited with spurring the explosion of the wiki as a Web-authoring medium.

If Wales is successful, the wiki-like search project could be serving about half the search queries of Microsoft's MSN and Windows Live, which accounts for 10 percent of the search market in most surveys.

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken," Wales says on a wiki devoted to the project. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that."