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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Friday he is putting the building blocks in place for a community-developed Web search service that would rival search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
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His commercial start-up, Wikia, has acquired Grub, a pioneering Web crawler that will enable Wikia’s forthcoming search service to scour the Web to index relevant sites.
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“If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers,” said Wales, chairman of San Mateo, California-based Wikia. “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.”
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Wikia has acquired Grub from LookSmart Ltd., which had halted work on the project.
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Terms of the deal between Wikia and LookSmart were not disclosed.
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Wikia has raised $14 million in outside financing, including its latest round of $10 million from Amazon.com, according to a regulatory filing by the company.
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