‘Wikimedia is working on its own search engine’

Recent documents would indicate that the Wikimedia Foundation is working on a search engine. For example, the organization received a grant of 250,000 dollars to work on this project. However, chairman Jimmy Wales disputes that there are plans for a search engine.

The Wikipedia newspaper The Signpost recently ran the story that Wikipedia would be working on a project first called the ‘Knowledge Engine’ and now known as ‘Wikimedia Discovery’. The project would aim to develop a search engine. However, this presumption is contradicted by Wikimedia itself. There would therefore be no question of the organization building ‘a second Google’, according to Wikimedia chairman Jimmy Wales. The project should improve its own CirrusSearch infrastructure.

Following the article in The Signpost, Wikimedia has now published the grant letter. This would show that the project is indeed aimed at developing a search engine, according to The Signpost. For example, the aim of the project would be to build ‘a system for finding reliable public information on the Internet’. The grant of 223,000 euros comes from the Knight Foundation, which is committed to innovation and improvement in areas such as journalism and media.

The letter also states that the Knowledge Engine should democratize the discovery of media, news and information. Unlike commercial search engines, this project aims to produce a ‘transparent search engine’, which should ‘make relevant information accessible and free from commercial purposes’. A risk assessment performed would also show that ‘the greatest risk to the project is if Google or Yahoo come up with the same idea’.

The details of the Knight Foundation’s scholarship were initially not publicly known. According to The Register, this was one of the factors that played into the departure of Wikimedia board member James Heilman in December. He is said to have put pressure on the board to release information about the project. He was also against accepting the grant, but in the end the board voted in favour.

The letter also states that the entire project will cost about $2.5 million and that the first phase will last until August 31 this year.

Design of a search page, as shown to the Knight Foundation