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If you want the most useful information possible to appear in response to a search, why not allow information portals like the community news aggregator Digg and travel site Kayak add it themselves? Search Wikia is opening itself up to allow companies to do just that, by adding their own widget to search results.

Wikia was started by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales in 2006 to try to take monetary advantage of the user contributions that drove the non-profit online encyclopedia to fame. The answer to the question above is “Because you can’t trust other companies with your service,” but Wales is betting on his users to weed out the bad widgets and support the helpful ones.

The company is launching with 14 partners, including the two above and others like AccuWeather, music site Amie Street, job listing site Indeed, micro-messaging service Twitter and local listings portal Yelp. Each company will have its own scheme for building a helpful widget.

Kayak, for example, will respond to searches like “SFO to JFK” by providing a search box showing travel fares from itself and other travel sites. And Yelp’s widget will be able to return a result for “pizza near Sears Tower” with listings for pizza joints near the historic tower in Chicago, according to Wales, by using geolocation data.

“I think everyone will do this in the future,” says Wales of the widgets. It’s true that other engines, including Google, already do some similar things, although often from their own internal services. Google, for example, uses Google Maps as a widget within its own search results. But Wikia’s approach allows for more innovation, vetted by users.

Whether enough users exist to drive the process and prevent gaming, is questionable. Wikia is still in its very early growth stages; Wales says it only recently broke 100,000 searches in a single day. The total market sees around 40 million search requests daily, according to comScore’s statistics, excluding certain kinds of searches.

Wikia also recently added more editing features for users and the widget framework, which users can also use. The company is working on a back-end overhaul to improve the automated portion of its technology.

It seems that all major new search engines undergo a somewhat similar birth. For months before they’re seen, they’re hyped, and anticipation builds to a fever pitch. The phrase “Google Killer” is inevitably bandied about. Then they’re released … to mass disappointment. The crowd disperses, at which point the true work can begin.

That’s more or less what happened to Search Wikia, the commercial counterpart to Wikipedia. Search Wikia proposes to improve search results through direct human editing, rather than using fully automated technology like Google or the newer semantic and natural language search engines. Released this January, Search Wikia was almost universally panned for offering poor results (though we were a bit nicer).

A new release today is adding a slew of features to the engine (some of which we previewed back in April). Users can now edit results extensively. They can modify the title and summary (seen below), add pictures or content from the page the result leads to, write comments, delete or hide results, or if they’re feeling less motivated, just give a star rating. All changes are closely tracked and logged. Helpfully, Search Wikia is also providing a quick way to switch to other engines if the results of a search aren’t good.

Those features address some pain points initial users had. Search Wikia’s initial editing tools were conceptually descended from Wikipedia, but Wikipedia isn’t known for ease or speed of editing.

But there’s a big caveat to all the new features: They only tangentially address the issue of search result quality. For that, there are only two real factors: The underlying search technology (i.e. Google-style automation), and human sweat equity. New tools may attract more users or make their work more effective, but in the end, Wikia just needs time to mature — not always an abundant resource in the fast-moving landscape of the Internet.

That’s why Mahalo, another human-powered search engine, has modified its approach several times, moving its focus to comprehensive pages built around subject areas — a strategy that appears to have led to faster growth. However, when I talked to Wikia (and Wikipedia) founder Jimmy Wales about Search Wikia, his faith in the idea of social search didn’t seem shaken by the experience of launching the product.

Wales says the next step for Wikia is working more on the automated back-end, which is based on the open-source Nutch and Lucene search engines. Following this release, the company will turn its focus away from user tools to customizing its internal tools and growing its index, which stands at around 30 million pages.

Another focus will be adding a “widget framework” for people to do specialized searches. Wales gave the example of searching for a zip code and coming up with weather results — an scheme that sounded a bit like the search-by-vertical approach that semantic engine Hakia started this year.

However, having seen the efforts of Hakia, Powerset and other new engines, Wales says he’s confident that social search is still the way. “I haven’t seen a lot of cases where [semantic search] improves anything anyone actually cares about. The right approach to search is to let computers do what computers do well, and humans do what humans do well,” he told me.

You can try out the new Search Wikia here. Let us know what you think in the comments, below.

When the guy behind Wikipedia launches a search engine, the world is going to watch. And watch they did when Jimmy Wales unveiled Search Wikia in January — perhaps a little too closely. I say that because while some were expecting to see a “Google-killer“, the site we saw was a bare-bones engine in the very early alpha testing stage.

But now, it’s getting closer.

I got a chance to play with some of the upcoming changes coming to Search Wikia. Those hoping for a more Wikipedia-style approach to search results will not be disappointed. You can test some of these features out for yourself at this link, but be forewarned that this is a testing site that may experience performance delays and bugs.

The main page is still something you’d expect on any engine, a search box. It’s after the query however that things get interesting. On hover of each result returned you have the option to ‘Edit’, ‘Spotlight’, ‘Comment’ or ‘Delete’ the item. Lets run down these options:

Edit: As you’d expect, you click this and you can directly edit both the title of the result and the paragraph explanation that resides under it.

Spotlight: Allows you to highlight one result on a page, giving it a yellow background to make it stand out.

Comment: You can leave messages under every result to discuss that items/result. You can also leave comments about other comments.

Delete: You can remove any result you feel doesn’t fit the query.

All of these changes are saved and shown in the ‘Result History’ area on the site (which has it’s own RSS feed - nice). If you are not logged in, your IP address is the unique identifier to show who has changed what — just as with Wikipedia.

One of the main problems people had with the initial launch of Search Wikia is that the search results simply weren’t up to snuff. While they company is quick to note that that’s probably still the case in this testing phase, just how much results improve after users edit them will be a test of the entire concept.

Editing links is one thing, but users can also submit their own. Adding related searches is also as easy as clinking the link to do so and typing in a relevant word.

Mahalo is a people-powered search site that has been rising in popularity. Its results return static pages with multiple links on a topic. While anyone can submit a link to include on these pages, and Mahalo has been encouraging this and more with its newer social tools, the pages are still for the most part built by one person — a Mahalo employee. Mahalo also monitors each link submitted to make sure it is not spam. [Full disclosure: I have done some work for Mahalo]

Search Wikia is attempting to take a more community-centric approach — not surprising given Wikipedia’s nature. You have a page of search results just as you would see on Google, but anyone in the world can edit and manipulate those results on-the-fly.

The obvious concern here is spam, gaming and the simple inaccuracies of such a system. The same issues arise from time to time on Wikipedia, but a group of users committed to the cause always seem to sort these things out. The fact that anyone can just as easily delete an item as create one, and that all of this activity is recorded in logs, make this possible.

Search Wikia is still in its alpha testing phase, and as such things are still a bit rough around the edges. However, with this update we are finally getting a glimpse of Wales’ vision for the future of search. It is very promising. Test it out for yourselves.

Wikia today announced a partnership with collaborative video site Kaltura that will allow the more than a million users of its MediaWiki software to post and collaborate using Kaltura content.

Kaltura, the self-proclaimed “YouTube meets the Wiki” (previous coverage here and here ), has a video extension that lets its users start a collaborative video project by uploading video clips, photos, or audio tracks to its wiki. Users can then edit collaboratively using Kaltura’s browser-based video editor. Users can import their video creations into Kaltura’s library of legally remixable content, which is covered under a Creative Commons license.

MediaWiki’s users will have access not only to Kaltura videos but to the collaborative editing feature as well.

According to Kaltura CTO Shay David, Kaltura is also working towards supporting other publishing platforms, including other wiki software, blogs, and content management enviorments. He said we can expect announcements on this soon.

Kaltura has 20 employees and raised $2 million in venture backing from Avalon Partners. It is based in Tel Aviv and Manhattan.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”

[Update: See our subsequent post here, which includes a deeper look, after Search Wikia gets slammed by other initial reviews]

Search Wikia, a new search engine site, has launched publicly after two weeks of private testing.

The search engine has been highly anticipated for its unique, open-source approach to search as well as its high profile founder, Jimmy Wales (pictured here), who has led online encyclopedia coverage).

We spoke with Wales under embargo last week about his plans.

This time, Search Wikia is a for-profit endeavor, part of Wikia, another company Wales co-founded. And it’s going after the biggest search engine of them all, Google.

According to Wales, Search Wikia’s primary innovation will be to tie a user’s social network - that is, information about the user and their friends - into search results. The idea is that a user and their friends share a common set of preferences and that using that information makes search results more personalized as well as more relevant. More on that in a second.

Here’s how it works: Users will see a familiar search interface (see screenshot below; I tried a search for “Warner Blu Ray,” looking for what Search Wikia has for results about Warner’s defection into the Blu Ray camp).

The twist, however, is that they can begin to shape the results without even registering for the service. First, users can influence search results by editing a Wiki section that appears at the top of each results page (see left red arrow below). This section is likely to be very similar to Google “OneBox” or Ask’s “Smart Answers” - a specially marked section at the top of the page that answers the user’s query without necessarily showing search results.

While Google’s Onebox is created algorithmically based upon the query (screenshot below), Search Wikia’s wiki results will rely upon its users - you and me - to edit the section. Since all search engines allocate a great premium to the first result, Search Wikia is effectively allowing its users to collectively control the most important result on the page. Search Wikia will use unregistered users’ IP addresses as a track record of such edits to prevent spammers from manipulating the section for irrelevant or malicious content.

Similar to Digg, Search Wikia will also allow all users (including unregistered users) to vote upon individual results using 1-5 stars, and to flag results that the user finds inappropriate or irrelevant to the query. Wales said that in the near term, the service will not yet use the voting to influence actual results. The current plan is to simply view user behavior first, collect data about that behavior and find the most appropriate way to feed these votes back into the search engine’s ranking algorithms, he explained. Search Wikia certainly won’t be the first to try this since Google Labs recently ran an almost identical experiment for users with a Google account (screenshot below).

Digg has had great success with its model of allowing users to propel the best stories to the front page, but it has also had to deal with spammers creating dummy accounts to artificially boost a story’s rank. Search Wikia plans to solve this problem by recording all clicks as public acts and using IP addresses or usernames to create a trail of actions. Wales also referred to Search Wikia’s reliance on a hybrid of algorithms and human intervention - as opposed to Digg’s complete reliance on user votes - as a way to eliminate the problem.

In addition to a search engine, Search Wikia will launch — also Monday — a full featured social network. Users that sign up for the social network (again, by registering) will have a profile page and the ability to befriend and message other users. At some point, we assume that a particular user’s search results will be influenced by the votes of the user’s friends within the Search Wikia social network. This approach to search is referred to as “social search” and other companies have tried their hand at it with limited success. Eurekster launched a search service in 2004 that ranks and re-orders search results based upon a user’s friends’ clicks. Today, Eurekster does not have a destination search site; instead, it builds social search into popular blogs and small websites. We tried a newsworthy technology query on TechCrunch’s site, which uses Eurekster search, and found that the results didn’t reflect our intended search — we wanted news about Warner’s defection into the Blu-ray camp (screenshot below). Yahoo! My Web, which launched in 2005, is also an attempt at social search - it allows users to bookmark particular results as well as invite their friends to be able to use their bookmarks for relevant results. While the service is still around, it has not been integrated into mainstream Yahoo! Search.

Wales has also held talks with Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks, one of the evangelists behind Google’s OpenSocial initiative. Search Wikia will support OpenSocial, allowing developers that build social applications for Google’s Orkut or LinkedIn to easily run same applications within the Search Wikia social network. Since some of the OpenSocial APIs are as yet , look for this part of the service to evolve over time.

Many new search engines also license search results from the major engines when they have no results to show for a particular query. Here is an example of Mahalo showing Yahoo and Google results because there isn’t a Mahalo page for the term. However, Wales confirmed that Search Wikia is not currently involved in discussions with third party search engines. He also confirmed that the service is currently performing a deep crawl of Wikipedia and that results from Wikipedia were likely to rank high in the beginning. Given these details and an index size between 50 and 100 million pages - compared to a Google index that is rumored to be well north to 40 billion pages, it is safe to say that it will be quite some time before Search Wikia can truly be a general purpose search engine. In the meanwhile, Search Wikia hopes that its approach to crawling the web - by using volunteers that download a desktop client software called Grub - will allow it to build a comprehensive index in a relatively short period of time.

[Photo of Jimmy Wales by Andrew Lih]

Saumil Mehta is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. Disclosure: He is product manager at Kosmix RightHealth (http://www.righthealth.com), which is also a search engine company. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Search Wikia, the highly anticipated search engine by Wikia, the for-profit company of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, will launch publicly on Monday. It is currently in private testing mode, and we’ll write more upon launch.

The huge success of Wikipedia in mobilizing humans makes this project particularly notable. It’s a fascinating alternative to Google’s computer-focused approach.

We’ve tested Grub, the service’s way of crawling the Internet’s web sites to collect data. Grub is a “distributed search crawler,” so named because it lets people download a software to do the crawling from their own computers, thereby letting thousands of people contribute to the process. It is intuitive and easy to use. However, large questions remain about the ability of Search Wikia’s approach to scale to the entire Web.

Wikia, the parent company, already has a live service independent of its Search Wikia’s efforts. The current site hosts free wikis — areas of the site open for collaborative editing — for communities in an ad-supported model. The resulting topics covered are usually deeper in detail than the average Wikipedia article. Wikia’s wikis use the same software that powers Wikipedia.

Search Wikia will borrow the ideas and principles that have made Wikipedia so successful–strong community emphasis, transparency, freedom to contribute and free licensing.

Search Wikia’s lofty aspirations of transparency raise some very important questions about the ability of spammers to manipulate search results. All the major search engines guard their ranking algorithms closely in order to prevent such manipulation. It’s clear that Search Wikia will rely on the same kind of community monitoring and self-policing that have made the fully open Wikipedia increasingly popular in spite of the same threats. According to a story by New Scientist, Jeremie Miller, the search project’s technology head honcho, the search service will integrate wiki-like tools to improve search. The ability to vote on search results is an example of such social tools.

Search Wikia will also rely on a cadre of volunteers to help it crawl the web with the Grub distributed web crawler. The Grub client is a consumer desktop application that harnesses spare CPU cycles on volunteers’ machines and crawls a small portion of the Web. The New Scientist article informs us that the January 7 launch product will have an index of approximately 100 million pages. Given the size and scale of the Web, this is a relatively unimpressive number and quite possibly not big enough to cover one vertical (say, Sports or Health), much less the horizontal universe of queries that any general search engine must be prepared to handle. That being said, widespread usage of Grub by hundreds of thousands of volunteers and an index that actually scales to the Web would be a disruptive development and a new way to think about search.

We tested the Grub crawler client (screenshots below) on a dual core Lenovo ThinkPad T60 laptop running Windows XP. The download and install process was a snap even though the Windows client is running in TEST mode and is expected to be buggy. We ran Grub using a Comcast cable connection for an hour and found that it crawled pages alphabetically by domain name. We also found that the Grub client accessed previously crawled pages to ensure freshness of content and updated the page only when required. We don’t know yet how the Grub system decides which URLs to crawl. It would also be interesting to see published estimates from Search Wikia on how many client installations it takes on average to build a crawl of, say, 30 billion URLs.

We also anticipate that Search Wikia will also rely on the same type of developer community that created world-class open-source projects like Mozilla Firefox and Linux. An April 2007 article in Fast Company says developers have been enthusiastic about being able to tweak complex search algorithms in an open-source environment. It’s easy to imagine a lot of talented developers wanting to try their hand at a problem that’s technically challenging on several fronts (see Anna Patterson’s article: Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard)

However, this is where the comparisons to Wikipedia become less believable. Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to edit pages around particular topics has been successful in part because everyone considers themselves expert enough to contribute cogently on a few topics. The same cannot be said of search technology. It’s unclear whether this community can deliver to the requirements of a web search engine.

Finally, there’s the question of organic traffic to the service. Wikipedia sites constitute the eighth largest set of properties on the Web according to Internet analytics firm ComScore. Wikipedia is a certified Internet brand, but as of December 2006, Google accounted for 50 percent of its incoming traffic, barring certain caveats (see Rick Skrenta’s post for more). It sounds unlikely that Google will send the same volumes of traffic to a competing search service. This also means that Wikia must face the unappetizing task of getting users to switch ingrained search behavior and start their Web surfing at a site other than Google.

Note also that another recent company that started life as a human-powered search engine–Mahalo — seems to be relying on Google SEO for distribution and traffic. As of December 29, 2007, Google has indexed 79,600 pages from the domain Mahalo.com, quite possibly as acknowledgment of the difficulties of driving organic traffic to a competing search engine. Over the next few days, we also plan to investigate questions around the company’s business model, its organizational structure for community developers, the set of social features it will launch with, and when it expects to scale to be able to serve a large portion of queries well.

Here’s the latest action:

Veoh Networks files preemptive suit against Universal Music Group — Veoh, the San Diego video start-up we’ve written about, said it filed the suit to assert its rights as a copyright-compliant company after UMG threatened it with litigation.

Geni gets cloned by a German Verwandt, but there’s also Israeli MyHeritage — Verwandt, the German copycat of the family tree social network company Geni, told us last month it had raised financing from Neuhaus Partners, and had broken into the top 500 sites in Germany according to Alexa, with more than 200,000 profiles in three weeks (was it spamming people?). Verwandt’s only real difference from Geni, however, is that it offers comic avatars, so we didn’t bother looking too closely. However, now there’s also Israel’s MyHeritage, which has just raised funding from Accel Europe. The company reportedly has at least $3 million and maybe more (checking). These sites are coming out of the woodwork and remarkably, all getting funding.

MySpace barely making any profit — News Corp.’s Fox Interactive unit, which consists mainly of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million during the last fiscal year. With MySpace doing 4.3 billion page views a day, it means the company is making a mere fraction of a cent on each page view — just the latest sign that social networks are in the early days of trying to monetize with ads.

Nirvanix to launch content delivery network — The San Diego, Calif. company aims to compete with Amazon’s popular S3 storage web service. In a statement, it said it plans to offer delivery of rich media and streaming content for web developers, and is designed to be “the backbone for social networking and web 2.0 companies.” It also plans to announce in September that it has raised venture capital, though the news has already leaked (funding is reportedly $12 million).

Google showing bias for sites that use Google Checkout — Google is using its clout to boost the ranking of sites that use its Google Checkout service, penalizing those that rely on eBay’s PayPal, according to this account. [Update: Google has responded: "It's common practice to include descriptive links in blog copy, and we added the link in question for that reason," a Google spokespersons said. "This was an editorial decision, and it was made independently by Google."]

Segway Enthusiasts Club of America disbands — The hyped gyroscope-laden scooter, the Segway, apparently is losing its fan base.

Blog network GigaOm has brought on a business person and a professional managing editor — Details here.

Internet music radios — Companies like Roku, Com One, Revo, Terratec and Tivoli have all produced tabletop or bookshelf radios that are “freaky hybrids” of the old radio and the new Internet. The New York Times’ Pogue has a review. You tune into radio shows just as you have for decades, but the radios’ antennas are internal Wi-Fi receivers that connect to a wireless home networks.

Xconomy, business technology new site focused on Boston area, raises undisclosed amount of funding — Founder Bob Buderi tells us the round was led by CommonAngels. Here’s his post about it. Robert Buderi is former editor-in-chief of MIT’s Technology Review. Steve Woit, publisher, is a partner at IDG Ventures in Boston.

The Universal Music Group acquires a stake in the operator of the urban social networking Web site, Loud.com — Details here.

Color-coding on Wikipedia edits — Wikipedia is about to test a quality-control technique: Coloring a new edit red, in order to flag potentially dubious content, especially if the editor is new or otherwise untrusted. As the editor gains a reputation, the marking color will change and become less red. There’s a test site here, and a visual example here. More details about the experiment here. It will first be tested on a related, smaller site, Wikia.

Ooma offers pre-sale orders of its Hub and Scout telecom products — Ooma says demand for its products, which allow free land-line phone calls, was sufficient to open orders for sales earlier than planned. We reviewed the home telecom product here.

Here’s the latest action:

Murdoch appears to have enough Bancroft family support for purchase –The jury is still officially out, but the NYT is saying it looks like Dow Jones and its jewel, the Wall Street Journal, will indeed to go to Murdoch’s News Corp.

Hakia’s Scoop Bar — Hakia, one of the new search engines trying to take on Google by using “semantic” technology, has released a so-called Scoop Bar, which takes you more directly to the text you’re looking for in results. When you select a result at Google, you get taken the page and that’s all. Hakia’s feature automatically scrolls down to where the good stuff is and highlights it. (Via Pandia).

Hitachi’s new search — The company has developed a search technology that can find images similar to a specified image from millions of images and video data in one second.

Wikia buys Grub — Wikia, the company that wants to draw on user participation to create a search engine that rivals Google, has taken another step. It is buying Grub, an screensaver users can download and which exploits their idle computer CPU time to crawl the Web. Search Engine Watch has a good story on this, explaining how the Grub open source technology works. GigaOm has an informative post too.

Yahoo Search Assist — These are the days of new search engine features. Yahoo now has a feature called Search Assist, which seeks to detect when you are hesitating about what search term to use, and then offers up alternative queries. It goes beyond guessing what word you’re typing. It offers up terms that are also conceptually related to the search query you’re using. There’s a good review at SearchEngineLand.

Live Search’s new commands for search — Microsoft has unveiled new short commands for image search. If you’re looking for images of Jimmy Hendrix for example, you can add “filter:face” to select only images of Hendrix’ face. There’s also “filter:bw” for black and white images, and “filter:portrait.”

Google enterprise — This software lets companies and other groups view their global data and imagery. Companies are using it, Google says, for things like designing new buildings, exploring for energy and responding to emergencies.

Cisco may have acquired Click.TV? — Cisco may have acquired a video annotation and deep tagging service called Click.TV which shut down last month, according to Techcrunch. A Cisco spokesman responded: We do not comment on rumors.

Google is promoting its Checkout more aggressively on its site — Details here.

PG&E to buy electricity from one of the world’s largest solar plants — Enough to power 400,000 homes, the power comes from a deal with Solel Solar Systems of Israel, which is building a 553-megawatt plant in California’s Mojave desert.

TextDigger is the latest company seeking that Holy Grail: Improving on Google’s results by understanding the sense of the words you’re looking for.

TextDigger’s search engine is called Digger, and it just launched at the DEMO conference.

First, some context: Digger, of San Jose, joins Powerset, the San Francisco start-up, and Hakia, of New York, and others which are trying to do something similar. Our piece on Powerset sparked debate within the search industry, namely because some experts believe automated search engines can never understand words the same way we humans do. Google, many think, is doing about as good a job as is possible. Google doesn’t try to assign meaning to your search term. It merely ranks the pages it thinks are the most popular that contain those words. Powerset still hasn’t launched. Hakia has, sort of, which we’ll get to in a minute.

TextDigger addresses the semantics problem by asking users to help it. If you search for “hotel with a view of the golden gate bridge,” it will tell you what it assumes about your intended meaning, and then asks you to modify. “View,” it tells you, means panoramic view, as opposed to personal belief. That might be fine, but what if you want personal belief?

By clicking on “refine keywords,” you can tell it you want “view” to mean personal belief (see screenshot below), or both panoramic view and personal belief. In other words, it is a classic Web 2.0 company, getting the masses to work on its behalf, and in turn improve results for everyone. This is significant, because Digger launches ahead of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ effort to do something similar. Digger relies on what people tell it about semantics. Powerset, by contrast, relies on smart grammar interpretation, which is very different.

Whether Textdigger can pull this off is another question.

It is in a closed testing period. You need an invite. Chief executive Tim Musgrove says it gets better the more people use it. It’s not ready for the masses.

We played with Digger. Our conclusion: We think this is useful tool, and we’d be surprised if Google didn’t implement something like this soon — especially if Digger gets any traction. It should be easy to do.

We should note, with Digger, you can choose to refine the word meaning for only yourself, or for the community at large. And there are shortcomings. Digger dissects meanings of individual words only, so it can’t assess the meaning of two or three words together, like Powerset is trying to do. The other shortcoming is that depends on you logging on at the site, to personalize results for you. It will have a hard time opening up to non-registered access.

TextDigger has received $1.5 million, led by CNET, where Musgrove was a researcher.

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Meanwhile, Hakia has quietly launched.

Check out what it is doing with searches for people, like for Madonna. It categorizes results into news, music profile, biography and more, rejecting the repetitive results that you get at Google. Similarly, look results for chocolate, India, The Beatles or Red Sox. It’s too early to tell what exactly Hakia is doing, as we’ve yet to talk with them. But it’s essentially a hybrid of Google and Wikipedia — a more aggressive push toward the categorization strategy that Ask has been heading toward (see the right hand side of this search for chocolate, for example).

Wikia.com, the Silicon Valley company that is building an electronic library on hundreds of thousands of topics, has received a significant interest in its open search engine idea.

Wikia heard from 700 engineers volunteering help to build the search engine — and that interest was generated from a single article by the Times of London, Gil Penchina, chief executive, told VentureBeat last week. The search engine will resemble the Wiki format of Wikipedia. The idea is to have humans lend a hand in judging what sites should appear in search results. The search engine, dubbed Wikisaria, would require thousands of administrators. Since the first Times article mention, there have been four million references online to Wikisaria, Penchina said. “People are saying we need to do this.”

As for Wikia itself, the site has seen double-digit page view growth every month over the past year, as articles get posted to popular wikis — subjects range from the diet of Klingons in Star Trek to interpretations of the Talmud by debating Rabbis.

The site will hit 500,000 articles in 45 languages and a 100 million page views this month, up from 140,000 articles and 25 million page views a year ago, says Penchina. Wikia is still hiring engineers, and spends 90 percent of its time fighting bad guys trying to fight off vandals from ruining sites, he said.

More surprising for us: Wikia’s rate card for advertising is set for $10 to $20 per thousand page views. It doesn’t get ads for all of its pages, but that’s a very high rate, given that most pages on the Web get a few cents from Google per thousand page views.

Penchina speaks with confidence about the site’s expansion. He likens his company to providing a library of books (Wiki theme sites), and the recent purchase of ArmchairGM expands into equivalent of magazines. Search, in turn, will expand Wikia even further into peoples’ lives.

He says popular online companies have sold too soon, and that Wikia won’t contemplate a sale to another company for now. “I thought the YouTube guys sold too soon. MySpace sold too early,” he says.

Related, but separate: There’s a rumor that Wiki.com, an unrelated domain sold for nearly $3 million last summer, has removed all the wikis on the site. (We don’t recall seeing what the site looked like before, but it is now closed). In any case, Wikia is making a public offer to help.

(Update: Baze, below, has link to Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales podcast on the search engine idea)

Roundup of the latest Silicon Valley action:

Browster, dies — The web 2.0 carnage is beginning to pile up. This week’s casualty is San Francisco’s Browster, the company that wanted to save you time by popping up a little image of a page when you scrolled over a link — letting you avoid clicking. It focused on search results at Google, but never found a way to make money. It munched through $5.8 million in funding from Advanced Technology Ventures, Vanguard Ventures, First Round Capital, and individual investors. (Via GigaOm.)

Amazon.com invests $10 million into Wikia — We reported last month that Amazon.com had invested in Wikia, the for-profit wiki company that is about to launch a user-directed search engine on the same principles as Wikipedia. At the time, the amount was confidential, but the deal has been been filed with the SEC, and reported by PE Week. This brings Wikia’s total investment to $14 million.

Dash, why not give us a choice? — Lot’s of publicity about the move by Dash, the car navigation system that hooks you up to the Internet, to sign a deal with Yahoo. Using Yahoo’s local search, users can find restaurants and other places easier. The idea isn’t new, because Dash told us in August it planned to go with either Yahoo or Google. (Here’s our first mention of Dash). But if your strategy is to give people an Internet connection — and thus be more open than the closed incumbent navigator players — why not give people a choice? We realize that it helps to configure search especially for the driver, and this may be a way to make money, but some of us have gotten used to Google and Ask City, both of which offer competitive, and in some ways arguably better (scroll to bottom), services.

Techdirt has raised funding — Techdirt, one of our favorite blogs, has launched an analyst business, and has raised $600,000 in new funding from six investors and from its own five-person founding team, reports PEHub, citing SEC documents. We wrote about the ten-year-old company here, when it launched its latest analyst offering — which lets its corporate clients pay for expert advice from analyst bloggers in Techdirt’s network.

India’s private equity boom — Private equity firms invested a record $7.5 billion in about 300 in India during 2006, according to a study by Venture Intelligence. That’s more than three times more than 2005, which itself was a record. (See info here.) Venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into 125 Indian companies during 2006, up from $1.1 billion invested into 70 companies during 2005, according to Thomson Financial. More here on trends, though we differ with Haislip’s analysis, which suggests the jump is due to regulations. Regulations or not, India’s growing middle class makes it a very attractive place to invest.

Marty, the repo man, not doing so well — You may recall Marty Pichinson, the fast-talking clean up man who moved from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley to shutter dot-bombs and negotiate away their assets with impressive rapid-fire skill. We followed him around in 2001, and so know him more than most. We almost got in an accident while driving in a passenger seat with Marty — he veered into a neighboring lane on Hwy 101, while talking on two phones and tapping on his PDA — all in the name of selling more of said assets. Our story about him even won an award from the Peninsula Press Club, and was picked up nationwide by other media. Marty has since become famous, but sadly for him, that bites him when the economy is relatively rosy.

Europe, forever divided — The Europeans will always find something to quibble about. When it comes to the world’s sexiest business — search — French are going to back their Quaero, while Germans prefer their Theseus. Good summary of the differences here.

Foreign jurisdiction perplexes U.S. companies — Brazilian judge orders YouTube to shut down for showing a local model having sex with her boyfriend on beach (YouTube is apparently removing it, but people keep putting it back up), while Netherlands bans the high-tech scooter, the Segway, simply for making riders lean back to brake.

Wikia, the San Mateo start-up founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, is working on a search engine that will use the same strategy as Wikipedia’s user-reliant encyclopedia.

The project is secretive, but has a preliminary launch date of the first quarter of 2007, the Times of London reports.

Wales says Google’s flaws have become more apparent:

Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…

Of course, Wikipedia’s reliance more than a thousand of human administrators has its own problems, such as human bias, so there will be no perfect fix. And there are plenty of other so-called social search engines that have already launched with varying strategies. VentureBeat recently reported on Yoono and Collarity, for example. There are ton of others. Just look at the Firefox recommended add-ons; about half of them have some sort of social search feature. And Yahoo could do a lot more with its social features (Delicious, Flickr and others), as Fred Wilson notes.

The idea is to have humans lend a hand in judging what sites should appear in search results. Google relies on computers, used to count things like the number of links a site has — and spammers are taking advantage of it. Among open-source, user-generated sites, Wikipedia has been among the more successful (it has more than 1.5 million articles, and despite its flaws and plenty of critiques, the site has gained a certain credibility). However, it is unclear how Wales’ other site, Wikia, is performing. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is for-profit, and it’s not certain how much user loyalty can be generated for such a site.

Wikia recently received a cash infusion from Amazon to help build out its features, as VentureBeat first reported here.

According to the Times, the search project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

The project will reportedly be built on open source search platforms Nutch and Lucene. Techcrunch has more details here.

Wikia, a San Mateo company that allows groups to share information about their interests with wiki technology, has raised a second round of funding — all of it coming from Amazon.com.

It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia’s collaborative encyclopedia process.

It enables “groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions.” Wikis are useful, because they let fans — Nascar fans, for example — find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia’s format isn’t exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia’s round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.

ArmchairGM’s four founders, Dan Lewis, Aaron Wright, David Pean, and Rob Lefkowitz, will join Wikia as full time employees and will continue to run ArmchairGM independently.

Last year, Bessemer Venture Partners led a $4 million investment in the company, joined by Omidyar Network, Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Joichi Ito and Mitch Kapor.