Jimbo Wales of Wikia plans to launch a new kind of search engine. One that will be open source and built by people and community for the people with user editable search results.

So what does this mean to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN? Perhaps the greatest threat. Just as Wikipedia has revolutionized how we thing about online information and encyclopedias, wikia search would hopefully create the same kind of benefit to the online community.

The idea for a user-editable search engine started in early 2002 (then called “3apes”). After some inactivitiy in 2005-2006 it has started progress again late 2006. Jimbo is appealing to the online community to spread the word and pitch in to develop this search engine (at http://search.wikia.com/).

So how would Google handle this? The success of wikepedia was primarily because Google gave it so much importance in it’s search results. These days Wikipedia listings are in the top 5 for the majority of searches online. So wikia search comes out later this year, would Google try and stifle the saturation Wikipedia or Wikia has in its results?

Guess we will have to wait and see.

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