Search Wikia, from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to launch today and will try to upset MSN, Yahoo!, Ask and Dogpile and steal at least second place in the Search war. Jimmy W is hoping to develop in a similar fashion to Wikipedia, using an army of volunteer collaborators to build it and expand upon it organically.

“Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It’s a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it’s in its very early days,” Wales said. “I don’t know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I’d say at least two years,” he said.

Volunteer
People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results. Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends’ actions.

Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a “mini article” at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.

Below the “mini article” will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time. Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. “That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results,” he said.