• Wikia Inching Closer to Open Source

    Wikia Inching Closer to Open Source

    Techtree News Staff, Jul 30, 2007 1253 hrs IST

    Wikia is looking towards a future where search will be truly open and transparent by marrying Grub, a massive user-contributed processing network, with a wiki.

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Co-founder of Wikia, Jimmy Wales, has announced the next big step to building of a new open source search platform with the acquisition of Grub from LookSmart.

A distributed search engine, Grub, is now operating as an open source model with users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal.

LookSmart claims Grub is designed such that developers can easily extend/add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system.

Wales said Wikia is looking towards a future where search will be truly open and transparent by marrying Grub, a massive user-contributed processing network with a wiki.

According to Wales, the new service will provide an even better search experience than commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Reportedly, Wikia and Grub will work towards freeing information from the shackles of invisible rules by combining computer-driven algorithms with human-assisted editing.

Wikia's first such service version will be made available to the public at the end of this year, Wales said. However, he clarified it would be for feedback purposes only.

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Discussion Board
(4) Comments
ramesh
,coimbatore, on Aug 01, 2007 10:13 PM
about grub search engine
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Joe
,San Jose, on Jul 31, 2007 05:28 PM
People don't realize what a mess the web has become simply because of 'get rich quick kings' creating garbage websites just to get a few pennies from google. Google is doing to the web what Microsoft did to personal computers - turning it into a corporate spy device and money funneler.
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Jorge Gonzalez
,Classified., on Jul 31, 2007 03:27 PM
Sounds like a very good idea to me.
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Jimmy Woo
,Bing, on Jul 31, 2007 10:25 AM
Wikia human assisted editing is the way to go, however, there is much room for problems due to competition being able to edit the site. There is a detailed writeup on this at www.badspace.com, it explains the pitfalls of open source editing.
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