Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales to launch Wikiasari search engine early 2007

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is planning a search engine to rival Google. The search engine, which is backed by Amazon, should be operational by early 2007. Amazon is the first corporate investor in Wikia, the commercial arm of Wikipedia.
The search engine will be called Wikiasari from ‘wiki’, the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’ and ‘asari’, from the Japanese word for ‘rummaging search’. Wikipedia also recently announced free hosting for community groups that do not charge for services.
Wikiasari will be based on a human judgement rather than computer algorithms. Wales claims that human judgement is better and that computer algorithm-based searches can be manipulated.
According to Wales, conventional search engine ranking algorithms lack the efficacy of human intervention. “Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,”says Wales, “Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.” Wales also complains about poor results from mainstream search engines, commenting: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap.”
A user-driven search engine service has a lot of potential if it is done correctly. Despite all of its problems, Wikipedia is still an extremely valuable resource and a site that I personally visit an average of three to five times a day. To compete with Google, Wikia will have to keep the advertising simple and focus on making Wikipedia’s neutral-point-of-view policy work for search rankings. If that happens, Google might have some real competition on its hands.