Watch out Google — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hopes that Wikia Search, a project he spearheads, will break Google’s domination as the world’s most widely used Internet search engine.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft dominate the Internet search engine market, which Wales said was already causing some worry among Web users.
“Right now in the US in particular we have a really strong concentration of the industry,” Wales said yesterday at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.
Industry statistics showed over 90 percent of Internet searches in the US are done through the three firms, he said.
“So a lot of people are really concerned about this ... Do we really want all of our traffic, all of our editorial control of the Internet all being piped through one, two or three companies?” Wales asked.
“I don’t think we do... I think we want to have a broader marketplace than that,” he said.
Wales said Wikia Search will run on an open platform, similar to the principles behind Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia in which entries can be made and edited by anyone with an Internet connection.
“All of the existing search engines are proprietary black boxes,” Wales said.
“You have no idea how things are ranked and what’s going on,” he said.
With Wikia Search, users “can participate in meaningful ways” when they browse the Internet, Wales said.
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