After more than one year of work and $14 million dollar worth of funding and collaborations with Amazon.com, Bessemer Venture Partners, Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreesen, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Lotus Development founder and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Mitch Kapor, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced the debut of Wikia Search engine on January 7, 2008.

Talks of a future internet search engine started December 2006, when Wales made a short comment on the possibility, but nothing was made very clear at the time. Wales limited himself to saying that Wikipedia and the ‘Search Wikia’ how it has been temporarily named, had completely separate managements.

It wasn’t until January 31, 2007 that Wales officially announced Wikia’s plans to build a search engine to rival Google and Yahoo, saying that “search should be open, transparent, participatory and democratic.” The goal was to achieve a 5 percent share of the search market, which still remains to be seen after this month’s launch.  

Jimmy Wales said, according to New York Times: “We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a ‘Google-quality’ search engine.”

One major advantage Wikia search engine will have will be the reputation of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, and the algorithm it is based on.  Users are given the possibility to contribute to the relevance of the results, by rating the results and even by adding mini-articles, a similar concept as that of Wikipedia.

 Wales continues to militate for the complete transparency and freedom of choice, as he thinks, according to the same source, that “it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors,” referring to the fact that there are only three major companies in the search engine market, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and no one is aware of the criteria they use when they rank certain sites.