Wikia Search will mark a new approach related to web searching engines. Interestingly enough, Wikia Search will be an open source search project, developed by Wikipedia’s creators. With open source projects becoming very much in fashion, Wikia Search’s developers are already hoping for their product to eventually challenge other tough search engines and even Google, the most popular search engine of the Web.

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 one single and simple idea, that of challenging the industry’s main players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales described search engine giants Google and Yahoo as opaque services, which do no explain how results are arrived at.

Jimmy Wales already invited a few people to test an early version of the search platform. However, Wikia Search will be publicly launched on January 7, as Wales announced through an email to the Wikia mailing list on Monday.

Wikia Search will be part of Jimmy Wales’ for-profit company, Wikia, which offers a software platform that anyone can use to build wikis. Thus, Wales’ company’s most recent project will allow other people to build their own search engines.