From CNN Money: "Wikipedia's next steps"

According to an other article by David Kirkpatrick from CNN Money, Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales plans to start a new search engine. Like the other Wikia sites, the engine will be open-source based; the ranking of each search result will be determined by a volunteer community, similar to the one that currently oversees Wikipedia. Wales' motivation for creating such a search engine is allowing users to know and control what goes on behind the scenes:

"Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet," he says,
"and unlike most of the infrastructure, today it's not transparent. We have no
idea how things are ranked or why." He believes that in the "open society" he
seeks on the Internet, it's important to have mechanisms in place that enable
people to "look under the hood" at the tools they use.

This has important implications for the future of search engines. As Wales is quoted stating in the article, the creation of this engine is "political" because of the extreme importance of the search engine to the Web. If the project is successful in allowing users to find what they really want by using humans rather than bots to determine search results, Wikia's new branch may rival the currently all-powerful Google.

Also, by bringing the interactive, user-determined format of the Wikia sites to the search engine, Wales' new project is indicative of the continuous shift toward the Web 2.0 school of thought.

You can read the article here: http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/22/magazines/fortune/fastforward_wiki.fortune/index.htm