At a gathering of about 100 of some of South Africa’s top geeks this week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales revealed what he said were some of the “first screenshots” of his new project on search. But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed us in the audience looked much more like a Facebook profile page than a search page. In fact, it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page.
Could this mean Wales is developing a social-networking Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?
(Read more about this development on my blog, and see more photos from Wales’ talk on my Flickr account.)
Described as “Google’s worst nightmare,” Wales said the main “failing” of existing search engines like Google is that they are secretive about how they rank search results. In stark contrast to the open-source movement, these search engines keep information about their algorithms and code close to their chest.
“It’s not a healthy thing that power is in the hands of a couple of companies. The information needs to be out there in the public and people involved,” he told the gathering in Johannesburg.
His angle is to take on the Googles of this world by making his new search project a collaborative one, much like that of Wikipedia. It’s the third time Wales has been to South Africa this year to talk about his projects and work with local communities.
Wales’ new projects are being created by a new company, Wikia. The company has been the subject of quite a bit of hype and speculation in recent times. Wikia is a separate organization from Wikipedia and aims to take the wiki concept to every other kind of work, book, or community projects that people might build. It also aims to extend the Wikipedia model beyond just nonprofit, educational and research communities.
