Wow, tons of buzz over the weekend over a new search engine started by Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia. The new engine is to be named wikiasari. The story was broken on The Times in the UK, where it describes how the engine will leverage the community.

“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.”

Techcrunch has claimed to post an exclusive screen capture, which was rejected;

The TechCrunch story is also wrong. This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Also, this is not an Amazon powered engine, but Amazon is funding part of a large part of the project.

We currently have a lot of discussion in the forums on this topic. The Google killer? :)

Brett Tabke came in Christmas eve to comment:

Lets try some math:

If you have 1000 people making editorial decisions at the rate of 3-4 pages a minute for 400 minutes a day = 1600 pages per person per day - or about 1.5 million pages per day. If you have 5000 people doing that - you have about 7.5million pages per day, or about 150million pages per month.

Strangely enough, I have heard the figure 150 million pages used in reference to the bulk of the long tail in the top two search engines. Meaning that the top 150million pages on the web comprise 95-98% of the search engine listings popping up in search engines on any given day.

That said, I would rather have machine based results. Humans are easy to manipulate (Ever hear of Dmoz? lol).

Also, Li Evans does a good job summarizing things.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & DigitalPoint Forums.

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