The founder of Wikipedia, the user-edited online encyclopedia, is developing a Wiki-based search engine to compete with established commercial search engines from Google and Yahoo.

Jimmy Wales announced plans to develop the search engine, to be named “Wikiasari,” or “Wikia,” for short, in a Dec. 23 online posting.

The Wikimedia Foundation of St. Petersburg, Fla., which manages the Web site Wikipedia.com, emphasizes that the search engine project is not associated with the foundation.

Wales said that current search engine technology, using complex algorithms to complete searches, is “broken.”

“It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability (and) lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that,” Wales wrote.
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NASA Ames Research Center and Google have jointly announced the signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA’s information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

“This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars,” said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin at Headquarters in Washington. “This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA’s space exploration work accessible to everyone,” added Griffin.

“Partnering with NASA made perfect sense for Google, as it has a wealth of technical expertise and data that will be of great use to Google as we look to tackle many computing issues on behalf of our users,” said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google. “We’re pleased to move forward to collaborate on a variety of technical challenges through the signing of the Space Act Agreement.”

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Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, was born in Moscow in 1973, and the first words out of his mouth were Russian. Yet neither Russian nor the Russian market has come easily to Google.
Rambler Media’s site is the third most visited site in Russia, trailing Yandex and Mail.ru. Google stands at eighth place.

Created in Silicon Valley by Mr. Brin and Larry Page, Google has adapted its search engine to dozens of languages, selling billions of dollars in advertising around the world. But in Russia, Google is behind the curve, trailing local Internet companies in executing searches and collecting rubles on the ads linked to those searches.

Mr. Brin left Russia with his family in 1979, and Google set up its Russian site three years ago and opened its first sales office there only one year ago, giving its rivals a long head start. But the company’s development has also been slowed by cultural and language issues, company executives — and rivals — say.

“Google promised they would destroy everything, but look at where they are,” said Irina Gofman, chief executive of Rambler Media, one of Google’s Internet portal and search service rivals in Russia. “They are not that big.”

In many Western European countries, Google is the most popular Web site and by far the most popular search service; in Russia, though, it barely breaks into the top 10. According to comScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, 28 percent of Russian Internet users on home or office computers visited Google sites in October, making Google the eighth-biggest Internet brand.
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