Wikia Picks Up Grub Web Crawler

The Wikia search engine project is back in the news with the acquisition of the Grub web crawler from LookSmart Ltd.  Grub started out as open source, went proprietary under LookSmart and will be released again as open source under Wikia.  It works on a distributed computing model where the community offers unused processing time to power the software.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia, is playing down the new search engine entry scheduled to appear in December.  He notes that when Wikipedia started that it only had three articles on it.  That's changed, of course.  The idea is to give the search engine time to develop substance.  And one wonders what that substance will be.  For example, the top searches on Google right now (via Google Trends) are:

1. bill walsh
2. danica mckellar
3. port clyde maine
4. steve walsh
5. luis castillo
6. bodhi elfman
7. american home mortgage
8. kevin archer
9. dawn fratangelo
10. eric wishnie

The first and third are driven by immediate news that Bill Walsh, legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers passed away, and that Chief Justice Roberts fell in his Maine home and had to be taken to the hospital.  Other searches beyond the top 10 include baseball trades (the deadline is near),  celebrities, diseases, and events.

One of the strengths of Google and the others is to index vast amounts of ephemeral information that is ever changing.  This may or may not be the market for Wikia, just as movie tickets or DVD sale sites may not be part of the equation.  The acquisition of a credible web crawler by Wikia may make all of this irrelevant.  We'll see if Wikia caters to the masses.