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According to this Washington Post article, Wikia Search is set to launch January 07, 2008. Wikia Search is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ open source search engine project, which he hopes will rise in popularity up to the point where it can challenge Google and the other major search destinations on the web.

How will we find what we’re looking for on the Internet in the future? There are different schools of thought on this subject, some of which go into the direction of natural speech.

As an example, Sahar recently launched a first version of Assista, a search engine that will serve you with questions about the keyword you type in. For example, if you want to search for the term “Myrtle Beach” Assista comes up with these questions:

What is special about Myrtle Beach?
What is the heavyest Tornado in Myrtle Beach?
What are some Fondue restaurants in Myrtle Beach?
Why are crime statistics so high in Myrtle Beach?
etc.

Sahar’s idea is that the more ask the more you will learn; and by tapping into other people’s questions you will have a variety of questions to choose and learn from, hence finding what you’ve been looking for and even learning additional stuff you wouldn’t have thought of before. Although Assista still has some problems with coming up with relevant questions in many cases (mind you, this is still the first public release), I think it is a very good idea that might eventually take off and make Assista one of the most popular search engines within the next few years.

Wikia, as far as I know, takes a more traditional route to become the new number one search engine, with the difference that its search engine system will be open source. This group effort, similar to Wikipedia, should make the search engine more transparent than Google and its other competitors. And finally, of course, Wales hopes that the combined knowledge and ideas of thousands of developers should help create a search algorithm and ranking system that is better than the systems of Google and Yahoo.

The idea is to challenge the established players by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. Wales has described Yahoo and Google as opaque services that don’t explain how results are arrived at.

Wales has started to invite a handful of people to test an early version of the search platform, which will be publicly launched on Jan. 7, he wrote in anemailto the Wikia mailing list Monday.

Personally, I’m no search engine expert and I certainly can’t say where the future of searching the web will be in the end, but a trend that is apparent already, is that some of the new search engines, just like Wikia and Assista, are sort of a group effort that involves the knowledge of thousands of web users and developers. This way, it is very well possible that Internet search will become more editorial but also more transparent, more democratized.

Another trend that has emerged lately is the increase in local searches performed by web users. This trend is also reflected by the high number of local search and content projects. Just take Google Maps and Google Earth as an example, you can even use Google at a gas station near you. I think it won’t be long until we will be able to browse the world through Google Earth, find local businesses and purchase items, see what our friends are doing and where they are, maybe even wander the stores in a 3D environment. A local search company I’ve been watching closely is Seattle-based Marchex. Not only owns Marchex one of the most valuable domain portfolios in the world, including thousands of geographic domains and ZIP code domains, but it also owns several providers of local content and is currently experimenting with a local blog network.

It’s still too early to say how we will find stuff online, answer our questions or learn on the Internet in the future… these are just some thoughts I had this morning. But this is a very interesting topic and, although I’m a great believer in direct navigation traffic, it is also my opinion that search engines are maybe the biggest influencers of the behavior of billions of web surfers, the content they have access to and even the way we conduct business online. Therefore, web search is an important topic that nobody should ignore and I’m grateful for the different approaches new search companies are taking to make web search more efficient and better for all of us, no matter which of these search engines will become accepted by the majority of end users. Maybe it will be a combination of what I mentioned above, niche search engines or something entirely different.