Wikia Search, A Community Driven Search Engine

Wikia Search, the new community driven search engine from Wikia, the for-profit company started Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, just launched in alpha tonight.

Miguel Helft wrote about the launch of Wikia Search for The New York Times.

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

Wikia Search is also a social network (yeah I know, yet another one). It has some Facebook-like features, including an area to update your status and a log of recent activity. Here’s the profile I just set up for Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.