The Wikia search engine, launched by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, announced an update meant to minimize the gap between the new system and the far more popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

The strategy involves a set of new social networking-oriented features which will allow users to modify the search results, grounding their decisions on what they consider relevant. The Web site’s visitors will be able to use some edit and delete functions, which will lead to a faster archive build and an easier index-maintaining system.

Since its alpha launch in January, Wikia Search managed to bring in about 20,000 registered users who have made more than 60,000 search results edits in addition to their 25,000 mini articles.

All changes are made without any sort of approval and the new concept depends on the search engine’s user community for a proper quality control.

"It's all the classic things that we learned from the wiki model: basically putting all that editorial control into the hands of the community so that it's easier to do good than to do harm. That's the basic philosophy," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It’s pretty much a “do whatever you want with it” makeover process, and Wales believes this to be a solution to give Wikia Search a little push, letting its user base decide the rate of its index growth. The engine is currently way behind other search engines, with only 30 million links, a small number as Wales admitted.

Whether the new concept will manage to catch up with its contenders or not, only time will tell.