Wikia Search launched live Monday in its first publicly accessible form.

The search engine, backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is an open source search tool that allows collaboration.

Wikipedia and Wikia operate independently and are unrelated except for Wales' involvement in each.

Wales announced plans for the project last year and said he wanted to provide an open alternative to Google (NSDQ: GOOG).

Wikia Search uses a social networking model, allowing users to create profiles, select friends, share photos, and manage privacy preferences in addition to providing traditional search capabilities. Users can click on an option to start or participate in discussions about search rankings and write mini-articles about search terms.

"After midnight on the West Coast, Wikia made its alpha search available. Our heightened interest stems from the early pronouncements by Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia. This time, his plan is to apply collaborative tools to build a better search engine than Google..."

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales - "alpha" version of his open source community-driven search engine, 'Wikia Search.' The basic premise is that instead of using a typical algorithm to prioritize search results, users can rate them on relevance.

I had a play with the site today, and it appears this will initially take the form of a simple five star rating system placed alongside each search result -- though the system is not yet active.

Although Wales insists the engine could eventually become a significant player in the search space, its reliance on user feedback means that it will take some time to become effective. As a result, don't expect it to challenge Google in terms of depth and relevance of results any time soon.

Jimmy Wales at FSFS.in Jimmy Wales had talked about few of his new initiatives at FSFS.in conference in Kerala, India.

Wikia Search Project Search Wikia is one of them. Unlike other search engines the methods of search indexing (algorithms) are open for all to see and understand. Would it change how the search engines work in future is yet to be seen

Portland, Oregon, July 27, 2007 - Wikia, Inc. (www.wikia.com) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, today unveiled major next steps in its work to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

"Yesterday brought the alpha release of Wikia Search, a new engine built on free software and free culture values. For Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the release is a milestone in the realization of a long-held dream. However, as he tells Linux.com, Wikia Search is still a couple of years from maturity, with many of the details still to work out. «Philosophically, I'm a big supporter of free software,» says Wales..."

Mention Jimmy Wales and you automatically think Wikipedia; however, that is not his only love child. The Wikia search engine is his latest offspring; or least it was when it was launched in January 2008. Wikia has been devised as a free software and open source alternative to Google and othersNow.

« While I personally believe in the opportunity for free software to make serious inroads into the search space, our project, Wikia Search, has not been enjoying the kind of success that we had hoped »

Look out, Google! Jimmy Wales is coming for you. The founder of Wikipedia is aggressively building out his Wikia effort, a commercial collection of Web sites anyone can edit. One of its key parts? Search.