A search engine created by the founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, will be launched in December.

Jimmy Wales, the former options trader who set up Wikipedia in 2003, believes that his Wikia Search will rival top search engines, including Google, within three years. Unlike the algorithms used by other search engines to rank websites covering a particular topic based on the number of links that they have, users of Wikia Search will help to rank websites.

Mr Wales said that human beings were better than computers at making an “editorial judgment” on which websites were most relevant to the search topic. “If you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘This page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgment, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way,” he said.

“But we have a really great method of doing it ourselves. 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.”

Although Wikipedia, which contains 8.2 million articles, all of which can be edited by users of the site, is free, Wikia Search will set out to make profits. Mr Wales has received backing from a number of business partners, including the Omidya Network, an organisation set up by Pierre Omidya, the founder of eBay. Profits will be made on advertising featured on the search pages.

Mr Wales believes that users will not object to helping a profit-making project because “it is fun to share knowledge” and because they will want to reduce the power of the search giants Google and Yahoo!.

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