Wikia plotting search rival to Google - Eric Auchard, Reuters

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said Friday he is putting the building blocks in place for a community-developed Web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon, that his commercial start-up, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites. "If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. "I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome."

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