Today, Jimmy Wales, the famous founder of Wikipedia, has launched its search project, Wikia Search. Announced last year in January and finance by “angel investors”, Wikia Search (previously known also as Wikiasari), will function on a concept similar to Wikipedia.

In fact, Wikia Search is combining the power of automated search algorithms with ith the knowledge of human editors. The volunteer collaborators will be able to suggest and rate the pages to be indexed.  

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

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

Wales is confident that the human judgement is better than any computer search algorithm. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,” Mr Wales said in 2007 when the project was announced for the first time. “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

“But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves,” he added. “We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.”

It remains to be seen if a community of human minds will prove to be better than the complex alghoritms developed by the search-oriented such as Google or Microsoft, but Jimmy Wales is confident that his project has its chances.

In March last year Wales said that the Wikia Search plans to capture as much as 5 percent of the search market and its collaborative search technology could transform the Internet's power structure.

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And it is currently broken," Wales said on a wiki devoted to the project. "It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that," he said.

Though, as Wales noted, Wikia Search is still in its alpha stage and it will take some time before the quality of the classic search engines will be achieved.

"I don't know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I'd say at least two years," Wales explained.

Human-powered search engine has became a hot topic lately. In May last year Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc, has started Mahalo, a search engine project, where is the websites are rated by human editors. The search engine results pages include beside text listings other media, such as photos and video.

Improving the search methods is also a major goal for web giants like Yahoo and Microsoft. Last year, Yahoo introduced Search Assist, a technology which goes beyond basic search “suggestions” and gives consumers real-time query suggestions as well as related topics and concepts.

Beside the Search Assistant, the web giant has introduced also Yahoo Search Shortcuts, with the most useful information found on the Web and contributed by other online users. The new shortcuts were designed to help consumers save time when searching for popular categories such as events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses and restaurants.

Also in September last year Microsoft unveiled its first major update of its Live Search engine. The company improved the relevance and it has quadrupled the size of Live Search’s index.

Common “problems” for search engines like spelling errors, stop words, punctuation and synonyms are now treated better with by Live Search, thanks to the “substantial” improvements in understanding query intent. So basically Live Search can “understand” what you wanted to search for, despite the fact that your search query is not very clear.

So, with all these improvements in search, let’s see which tools will prove to be better to help you with your searches!