Wikipedia founder to launch search engine

Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is going to start up his own search engine. Wales has the backing of Amazon.com, and is calling the new search Wikiasari. (“asari” is Japanese for “rummaging search.” Nice.) According to the Times, the project has major funding from Amazon and a group of Silicon Valley VCs. Wales is calling out Google too, with a little trash talk: “Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results,” the Times quotes him as saying. If anyone else were to launch a new search, I’d say they were doomed to failure. But Wales may just put up an interesting alternative. (More information here.)