A search engine from the creator (Jimmy Wales) of online encyclopedia Wikipedia will be made available to the public next week.

After just a few weeks of invitation-only testing, Wikia Search/Search Wikia (Not quite sure about the actual name as the logo shows one name but text shows something else) will debut on Monday, 7 January.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales said the open source search engine would be released for public viewing in “alpha” so users can complain about flaws and developers can work out the bugs. Last February, Wales announced plans for an open source search engine to offer what major search engine does not provide transparency. He said during a talk at New York University that the new search engine could take the mystery out of how information on the Web is scanned, retrieved, and ranked.

The goal with Wikia is to let volunteers improve search technology collectively; the way Wikipedia lets anyone add or change entries. This means anyone will be allowed to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results. Contributors began with Lucene and Nutch (two open source and Java search engines based on the Apache Jakarta Project), then copied, modified, and redistributed the code. Though there is a traditional ad revenue model announced, but it’s unclear how the search engine would protect privacy.

In the meantime, Wikipedia faces its own challenge from Google. The search engine giant has announced a project called knol, which will differ from Wikipedia by identifying who wrote each article and giving authors a chance to share in Google’s advertising revenue.

So it’s just a matter of time to see who takes on whom, note: Wikipedia still runs google ads.