Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is preparing to launch a search engine. The Times of London reports that the new search engine will be called Wikiasari, combining the Hawaiian word "wiki" which means quick with the Japanese "asari," which means rummaging search.

Wales is basing Wikiasari (which Techcrunch reports had initially been billed as Wikisearch) as an improvement upon the traditional search engine method. Sites like Google rely on computer-based algorithms to determine which search results are most relevant to your query. Wikipedia is based on a million trained monkeys (that'd be you) constantly updating an online encyclopedia. Why not apply that method to search results?

The search engine will be open source, and the index will be available under a GFDL.

According to the main page of the project, Wikiasari is being reworked and could be set to launch on December 27th. Given that Wales has now shot down several bits of info that had been circulating, (Amazon is not involved in the project, as the Times had reported, and Wikiasari is not tied in any way to Wikipedia, as Techcrunch had reported) I'm reluctant to guess much more than that at the moment.