Jimmy Wals, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman of Wikia, announced at O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that Wikia has acquired Grub, a web crawler, in order to build a new search-platform based on open-source protocol.

Grub was developed by LookSmart and unlike other crawler it operates donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal.

This means that users can download and install Grub and then allow it to operate as a background process on their computers.

By combining the power of Grub with the knowledge of human editors, Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent, Wales explained.

A public version of Search Wikia will be launched toward the end of 2007.

Being released as an open-source platform, developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system

Wales expressed his believe that an open search platform might better compared to the proprietary technologies used today by all major search engines.

"If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."

The financial terms of the deal between Wikia and LooSmart weren’t disclosed.

Grub is available for download and testing at www.grub.org