The end for Google?
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Wikia Inc., the company behind Wikipedia, has launched ‘Wikia Search’ in its public alpha on the 7th of January. It is a new search engine, and its principle is meant to be a revolution, as it is the first open-source Web search engine.
Wikia Search uses ‘Grub’, an open source distributed search crawler. It means:
- Anybody can participate to improve the code of the crawler.
- Users can download a Grubclient and crawl the Internet. The result is then indexed by the Wikia search servers.
- Users can submit and review websites.
The results of a search with Wikia Search will be inaccurate still for some time, as Grub needs to be installed on users’ computer and crawl an estimated one hundred million websites worldwide.
Wikipedia is now the 9th most visited website according to Alexa, and is almost as accurate as Britannica. The same way, Wikia search, using the open source community, could become a very serious competitor for Google.