Jabber Archive

Wikia has posted a press release this morning which details a bit more about their search product. The major announcement is that Jabber founder Jeremie Miller has joined in on the search engine creation.

From the release:  “The Internet and Web are founded on completely open principles, I’ve championed this philosophy for instant messaging and believe that the awesome power of search should be based on the same fundamental rules,” said Jeremie Miller. “The power of a simple protocol is that it enables networks of resources to collaborate openly, to be constructive instead of competitive. I'm eager to work with Jimmy and empower everyone in the search industry with a transparent collaborative open protocol, from researchers, to developers, vertical search startups, and most importantly, end users.”

“Jeremie is a brilliant thinker and a natural fit to help revolutionize the world of search,” said Jimmy Wales, founder and chairman of Wikia. “I believe Internet search is currently broken and the way to fix it is to build a community whose mission is to develop a search platform that is open and totally transparent. This is exactly what we’ve set out to do at search.wikia.com and we’re thrilled to have Jeremie helping evolve this vision.”

I am on the search mailing list and there really are some passionate people around this search engine. Whether it can make it to the big time is still to be seen, but Wikipedia has some mainstream appeal, appeal which is critical for making a search engine work. I have heard the term Wikipedia referenced several times on TV news and report shows. Of course Google is still the most popular Internet term, it has reached Kleenex in branding.

Lately there has been some Google bashing so this might be a perfect time for a launch. I think they could use some design work as well to really get this to take off – way too much content on the home page currently.