Wikia’s founder, Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia as well) announced the new extension of wikia.com, the Wikia Search Engine. Wikia is adding a few new twists on the whole search engine thing though. They will of course use the ranking and algorithm system that companies like Google, Yahoo, and MSN use today, but they will also allow the users to rank the search results by themselves. This will add human intervention to the rankings, and will eventually eliminate link-spam sites and will promote not-so-well-known sites that have good, rich content get searched a lot more.

You will also be able to attach your profile to certain search results that you feel you are an expert in, or show a particular interest in the subject. Users can also create mini-articles that sit on the top of results pages. As with any Wiki, users will be able to edit them as the wish.

But, best of all, the whole engine is Open Source. We’ve never seen a major search engine roll out will fully open source. Users will be able to download the whole engine, from the ranking algorithm to the crawler/bot. Users can then tweak it for their own use, or use the information to optimize their site to get better rankings in Wikia Search. This sort of activity will bring a whole new wave of meaning to the SEO industry, if Wikia ever becomes any sort of a big deal.

Try alpha.search.wikia.com for yourself.

I wouldn’t say ‘major’ but they certainly have the potential to be so. And if they are I’m sure you and all of us in the blogging community could certainly benifit big time if they do generate a large volume of traffic.

But it’s going to be very hard, and probably impossible to even get close to Google.