It was just announced that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be attempting to use the power of mass collaboration to power a commercial search engine. Amazon, which launched product wikis on their site a while back, is providing the financial backing for the new venture. The product will be called ‘Wikiasari’ and they are planning a provisional launch for the first quarter of 2007.

Wales hopes to translate the community power that runs Wikipedia into creating a better and more intelligent search engine. “Wikiasari will be designed to apply the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to judging a Web page’s value” states Wales. BusinessWeek has an interesting article on this Crowd Wisdom vs. Google’s Genius

I am personally interested to see how the Wikipedia community reacts to the commercialization of something that up until this time has refused even corporate sponsorship. It will also be interesting to see just how the search will work? Sites such as Digg and Reddit use the wisdom of crowds to percolate interesting news stories and links to the masses, and I am anxious to see just how a wiki/search mash-up will operate.