Tech Shout!

Yesterday, the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content Wikia unveiled the next major steps that it is taking to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration.

Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales discussed various business models as well as his vision for building the LAMP stack for search, which is possible by assembling open-source technologies.

The main announcement of the day was related to Wikia’s acquisition of Grub, the original distributed search project from LookSmart, and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years.

Basically, Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing system resources towards a common goal. It is now available for download and testing at www.grub.org.

According to Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman Wikia, “We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space. The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”

Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system.

By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.

“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said Michael Grubb, Senior Vice President, Technology, and Chief Technology Officer, LookSmart. “We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source license. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here.”