Internet Search Engine Wikia, a project from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his company Wikia launched today as a new competitor to major search engines such as Internet search leader Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

Wikia is an open source search engine that plans to follow the wiki model where people contribute voluntary to develop the search engine. The service was made to rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm.

Through the website, users are encouraged to rate upcoming search results according to quality and importance. It will steadily incorporate that feedback in its Web pages' rankings in order to present more valuable search results.

Wikia Search engine was launched on January 7 in a public alpha test.

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And we are making it open source, said Wales. Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed. He added.

Wikia Company has received an investment of $14 million from Amazon and Bessemer Venture Partners. It is an independent company of the Wikiamedia Foundation and has stated plans to earn money from Wikia.com by selling ads.

Mr. Wales has acknowledged the great popularity of companies like Google and Yahoo regarding search engines but has noted the way such companies rank websites is not transparent.

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