Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, announced that the long-expected open-source search engine Wikia will debut for the public next week, on January 7.

With four basic principles in mind (Transparency, Community, Quality and Privacy), Wikia will officially come out in an unpolished alpha-phase- a move aimed at fine-tuning the engine with the help of its future users.

"We want to run over the system with help from people to complain about what is broken," said Jimmy Wales in an e-mail sent to the Wikia community.

Similarly to all the other search engines, Wikia Search will assemble the basic technologies for a search engine, which includes a search application, a search algorithm and a Web crawler. However, different from all the others, the project will let tech enthusiasts help filter web sites and rank search results, using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia.

Wikia Search is based on a simple idea, that of challenging the industry’s main players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users. Internet citizens will be able to see and understand how search results are displayed.

"That reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic," said Wales in his e-mail.