In what will generate enormous controversy, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia intends to create a search tool using the open source approach that he used to develop Wikipedia.

This will have consequences for how people locate banks, and financial information.  It will eliminate SEO, as a concept and as a function.  I like the concept, that would lever the 1% ‘rs.  This would be social search, as compared to algorithmic search.

The downside will be the inevitable attempts to pollute with skewed commercial interest.  Should prove interesting.  He is working with Amazon on this. UPDATE: according to their site Amazon are not involved.

Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: “this page is good, this page sucks”,  Mr Wales said.  Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves, he added.  We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

Mr Wales believes that the reputation already fostered by his Wikipedia community and the transparency of his technology will build sufficient trust in his search engine to bring in advertising revenue and make the Wikiasari venture profitable.

“The revenue model of search is advertising. Transparency in search, therefore, is like transparency in news. If the quality is there people will come.”

Source: Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google – Industry sectors – Times Online