Wikipedia is about to challenge Google: "knowledge engine" project received contributions
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2016-02-26 14:53:04
Wikipedia recently received a 250,000 dollars grantfrom the Knight Foundation for the first year of workon the "Knowledge Engine" project. According to theformal agreement between Wikipedia's parentcompany Wikimedia, and the Knight Foundation —the purpose of the project is to build a search enginethat can oppose Google.
Initially, the grant was awarded in September 2015, but details were only made public thisweek. The total budget of the project to build what's being called "the world's firsttransparent search engine" is estimated at 2.5 million dollars; though only a fraction of thathas been received to date.
The document lays out further rationale behind the project, stating the Knowledge Engineproject is needed as a way to respond to online trends. In Wikipedia's case, this includes moresearchers shifting to mobile, a drop in page views, and information pulled from Wikipedia beingdisplayed directly in Google search results.
Also contained in the formal agreement is text explaining the company's desires todemocratize search, and create a search engine that doesn't serve commercial interests.
"The project will pave the way for non-commercial information to be found and utilized byinternet users… it will make the Internet's most relevant information more accessible andopenly curated, and it will create an open data engine that's completely free of commercialinterests."
This is not Wikipedia's first attempt at building a search engine. There was the Wikia Searchproject of 2009, which was abandoned after not attracting enough interested users. When theproject failed, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales stated he would one day return to search. Sevenyears it looks like he's willing to take on the challenge once more.