Wikia has acquired Grub, a web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the web to index relevant sites.

Published: 30 Jul 2007

Wikia has acquired Grub, a web crawler that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the web to index relevant sites.

Wikia acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd. and released it under an open-source
licence, adding a significant component to Search Wikia, scheduled to debut in
the fourth quarter.

As per the information available, the Search Wikia project seeks to create a
search engine based on open-source search protocols and human collaboration,
drawing from the concept of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, which is written
and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators.

As such, it will provide a better search experience than the ones offered by
commercial, proprietary search engines like those from Google Inc., Yahoo Inc.
and Microsoft Corp., reportedly said Jimmy Wales, Wikia's co-founder and
chairman, and the founder of Wikipedia.

However, users shouldn't expect Search Wikia's first version to deliver on
this lofty goal, reported media. "When I opened Wikipedia with only three
articles in it, it was a pretty bad encyclopedia," Wales said. "That's where
we're going to be in December with the search engine. We'll tell people
upfront: It's not very good yet. But we'll open it up to get feedback and
community involvement to help us make it better."

If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the
balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers," said Wales,
Chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. "I could be wrong about this, but
it seems like a likely outcome."

The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and
human-assisted editing when the company launches a public version of the search
site toward the end of 2007, Wales shared.

According to media reports, Wikia will immediately release Grub to the open
source community, and make both the crawler and source code available at
Grub.org. Users who download the application can run it either as a screensaver
or a background process while other applications are running.

Specifics of the deal were not revealed, though it is part of a larger
advertising deal between Wikia and LookSmart which was announced last week.
Under the deal, LookSmart will provide text and display ads in Wikia's freely
hosted wiki communities, and eventually on the Search Wikia site, Wales said.
Ads will be sold by Wikia on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand
impressions (CPM) model. Inventory not sold by Wikia will be back-filled by ads
from LookSmart's distributed ad network.