Wikipedia is releasing their own search engine next week which one day Wikipedia hopes will rival Google, Yahoo and MSN. It will be titled Wikia Search and will have the same user control as Wikipedia, at least in the beginning.

Wikipedia hopes that allowing users some say in the way search engine results are displayed that technology for search engine results will be improved.

Wikipedia will initially index 50-100 million pages, barely even a fraction of all web pages. They hope that Wikia Search will be able to fight spammers while showing the most relevant results. While Wikia Search knows that they won’t be able to combat Google right off the bat, they do hope in the future that Wikia Search will be able to compete with the big 3 search engines.