Wikia is a new open source search engine that relies on human input rather than algorithmic processing to provide relevant search results to end users. The active areas of research include:
- Social Lab – sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
- Distributed Lab – projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
- Semantic Lab – Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
- Standards Lab – formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.
This sounds extremely close to what we are doing with our searching. It may be worthwhile to keep an eye on this project for future use.