(30 July 2007 1:30 pm)

MUMBAI: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is all set to foray into the search engine space. He is currently putting together a community-developed web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

At software developers' conference in Portland, Oregon, the chairman of the California based Wikia said that his commercial start-up, Wikia has acquired web crawler Grub that will enable Wikia's forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites.

Wikia has raised $14 million in outside financing, including its latest round of $10 million from Amazon.com, according to a regulatory filing by the company.

"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. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to be the likely outcome," said Wales.

Wikia has earlier helped in the setting up of Wikipedia-style sites on a diverse range of topics.

Open search is part of Wikia's broader push to promote the spread of free content publishing on the web. Wikia's objective will be to make editorial judgements of modern web-search systems more explicit in nature, since search engine giants like Google keep secret key details of how their search systems work to prevent spamming and for competitive reasons.