Jimmy Wales is using more of the real estate on his Wikia home page to explain what the mainstream media got wrong than he is explaining what he has in mind. The gist of the message, though, is pretty clear: Wales plans to release a first pass at a new search engine sometime in the first quarter of 2007.

The announcement, covered in such places as The Times of London, makes it clear that Wales intends to compete with the search giants, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The Times quotes Wales saying, “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.” Instead, Wales plans to use the same kind of user-generated approach to the search engine that has driven his best-known effort, Wikipedia. He told The Times:

Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ???This page is good, this page sucks.’ Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.  But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

And on his own site, he adds, “Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search.”

The obvious question is whether any search engine can supplant Google as the 800-pound gorilla. The answer, to me, is an unqualified “yes.” After all, who would have thought an upstart called Google would ever replace Yahoo! as the dominant search engine. User loyalty is to be tool that produces the best results, and if Wales’ endeavor produces those results, people will gravitate to it.

Interestingly, media coverage of Wales plans has focused on a partnership with Amazon, which Wales denies. Prominent on the search project home page is this disclaimer: “Amazon has nothing to do with this project. They are a valued investor in Wikia, but people are really speculating beyond the facts. This has nothing to do with A9, Amazon, etc.” Wales also claims Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch report on the project was inaccurate: “This project has nothing to do with the screenshot they are running, and this search project has nothing to do with Wikipedia.”

Interesting, isn’t it, how both mainstream media and the blogosphere were inaccurate in their reporting.

I’m sure Wales would rather focus his effort on finding people to help build the serach engine, which he has dubbed Wikisari, a mashup of the Hawaiian word for “quick” and the Japanese word for “rummaging search.”

For now, everybody is invited to subscribe to Wales’ Wikisari mailing list.