Wikia Search

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[edit] Preface

For most of us search is Google and Google is search. No wonder Google is so popular. Google has built up a excellent infrastructure that revolves on "searching the web". It has won over all search engines and looks like a unbeatable King of search. Or is it?

For years Encyclopedia Britannica was the King in providing information to people. It did have competition from other encyclopedia's, but it was finally pushed down by a project called Wikipedia started by Mr.Jimmy Wales. He created a Encyclopedia which is for the people and is edited by the people. Very soon Wikipedia's articles outnumbered those of Britannica and people flocked to it for information.

Wikipedia is not funded by a company, corporate or any particular organization. People all over the world contribute to it, hence Wikipedia is a project purely funded by the Human Race. All content in Wikipedia is open and free to use and is not copyrighted. But still Internet search technology is not a free (free here means freedom, visit http://www.fsf.org to know more) one though its such a vital technology, used by millions of humans every day. Search companies maintain secrecy, they are corporates and hence can be controlled by people who might wish to tarnish search result for their gain.

In this case Mr.Jimmy Whales dint fear to take on the search giants Google, MSN, Yahoo and Altavista to free humans from depending on propitiatory search technology. He created a project called Wikia Search ( http://search.wikia.com/ ), whose sole purpose is to free the search technology.

As the first page of Grub (free search crawler) quotes

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will start to change all that."

[edit] Whats this book for

This book aim to document the entire Wikia Project. The document will be divided into following sections:

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