Despite Google's $159 billion market cap - or rather, one suspects, because of it - Jimmy Wales, the guy who created - for better or worse - Wikipedia, figures Internet search is broken - because it's proprietary - and needs to be reinvented, freeing "the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box."

(Odd, he questions the biases of algorithms more than Wikipedia articles. Hmmm.)

Anyway, back six or seven months ago he set up a LAMP-based project called Search Wikia to build a new for-profit search platform out of open source search protocols - like the open source Lucene search engine widgetry - and Wikipedia-like human collaboration.

Wales has now acquired the Grub web crawler - dusty shelf-ware for the last few years - from LookSmart Ltd, an online targeted advertising company, on undisclosed terms and open sourced it.

However, since LookSmart will be feeding ads into Jimbo's existing for-profit venture-backed Wikia wiki communities under a new Google-replacing arrangement it seems apparent where Wikia Search is going.

Grub is supposed to push the Google replacement effort along since Lucene lacks a crawler.

Grub is for building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network - out of volunteers' idle PC cycles to save the cost of building a massive secure infrastructure. And Wales says that combining it with a wiki to form social consensus - and tease out the meaning of words - will move Search Wikia "towards a future where search is open and transparent."

He also says provocatively enough that the idea has generated "a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space." No doubt, considering the apprehension and envy Google elicits.

Jeremie Miller, the founder of the open source instant messaging platform is now running Wikia Search.

See www.grub.org. Also see http://search.wikia.com.

According to Reuters, which remembered that Amazon has $10 million out of the $14 million in Wikia financing raised so far, a public version of the search site is supposed to launch towards the end of the year.

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