Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! Mr. Wales has begun working on a search engine that exploits the same user-based technology as his open-access encyclopedia, which was launched in 2003. The project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”. Google searches are conducted using an algorithm that calculates how many other websites are linked to a certain site, which in turn gives the material found by the search a ranking.

Therefore, the first result in any Google search is the website that has the most links pointing to it. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by thousands of contributors from around the world, known as “Wikipedians”, using free open-source software. Mr Wales aims to exploit the same network of followers and the same type of free software to create his search engine.