Wikipedia founder to compete with Google

Jimmy Wales hopes his new search engine will compete with Google and Yahoo

Jimmy Wales, the creator of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has unveiled details of his company's community-developed open source search engine.

The new site, due to launch by the end of 2007, will combine human-assisted editing with computer-controlled searches. Earlier this year Wales' commercial startup company, Wikia, purchased the rights to web crawler platform Grub.

Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer's processing power while the machine is left idle. If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.

Wales says that the combination of human input and computer-driven technology could help Wikia Search to handle ambiguous words with multiple meanings.

'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 at a software developer conference in Oregon.

Wikia has collected $14m (£6.9m) in funding, $10m (£4.9m) of which has been provided by online retailer Amazon.com