search:About
This site – Search Wikia – is a Wikia project and serves as a platform for the development of a new free/open source search engine with user-editable search results. [1]
This wiki accompanies the development therefore, and is used as a sounding board for ideas, organization and technical stuff. It is a place for the search community to discuss the project and search related issues.
Search Wikia itself is not a search engine or a web directory.
History
There was an early project, called "3apes", which started in September 2002. This had been a directory-style search engine.
In March 2004 the Search Wikia project replaced 3apes. Then, this site was founded by Jimbo Wales in July 2004, and it served as a sounding board for ideas and development of a free/open source search engine with user-editable search results. [2]
As of October 2004, this site was called "Wikia". There were two parts to the project: this wiki, and software which was at a beta stage and had not been publicly launched (the software was named "Wikiasari" in November 2005 [3] but this name will not be used for the new search project). The software was a front-end to a database of URLs with information such as keywords, ratings, and whether the URL was adult-oriented. There were more than 300,000 URLs in the database at last count.
In 2005, this site became rather inactive due to several reasons, and stayed like this up to the end of 2006.
In the meantime, as of March 2006, the name Wikia was given to the wiki hosting service previously known as "Wikicities" (see About Wikia), leaving this project no name other than the name previously given to its search engine software, Wikiasari. Most of the former content of this site were moved to Central Wikia.
As of November/December 2006 the idea to work again on the development of an open source search engine was revisited and interested people are invited to join the search mailing list to discuss this.
Copyrights
The text of this site is freely licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
Notes
- ↑ Compare this site's entry on Central Wikia.
- ↑ See the according SourceForge project (last used in 2004, outdated).
- ↑ See search:Wikiasari as of 2005-11-15 for the naming contest.