The eccentric creator of popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Jimmy Jimbo Wales, plans to launch a search engine that will rival Google in the fourth quarter of 2007. Those are bold predictions from Wales, but it’s hard to underestimate the man who founded the sixth-largest website in the world.

The new community search engine, which he calls Search Wikia, is an effort to create an open-source competitor to Google where a Wikipedia-style universe of users rates websites and sorts the search results. The concept is to combine search with the community features of user-editable search results made possible by using wiki technology.

And unlike Google, Search Wikia plans to publish the design of its algorithm (the mathematical formula that determines what website comes top of a search). Wales likes to emphasize that Wikia’s inner workings will be transparent to everyone. If the search process was open to inspection, he feels that users would put more trust in the results they receive.

In interviews, Wales has stated that Search Wikia will be an “open, thoughtful search engine, one which will have better quality and more thoughtful results than its rivals. Like the volunteer-created Wikipedia, Wikia is an attempt to take the open-source, community-based model to profitability and broader public acceptance.
In the April issue of Fast Company magazine, which did a cover story on Wales (Why Is This Man Smiling? by Alan Deutschman), Wales said Wikia will be the search engine that changes everything…. Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.” He envisions people intervening to improve on the machine-generated results that we’ve become accustomed to.

Fast Company also cites a few statistics in Wikia’s favor: “Only 21 percent of professionals always feel that search engines understand their queries.” And only 10 percent “always find exactly what they want on their first attempt.” In another study by French linguistics scholar Jean V’ronis, 28 percent of users felt that all the search results were “totally useless.”

Google can sleep well at night for the time being, Wales stated in recent interview with CNET News.com. We are trying to build a full open-source search engine of high quality. If that works, then Google will have a lot of competitors in search. But if they dominate the ad business and treat those competitors as partners for ad sales, then we will look back on the days when we thought Google was a search engine instead of the central ad marketplace of the planet and chuckle.

Many regard Wales ambitious project to be a long shot, but, then again, who would have bet on a little startup company called Google in the late 1990s?