Wikia Search launched live Monday in its first publicly accessible form.

The search engine, backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is an open source search tool that allows collaboration.

Wikipedia and Wikia operate independently and are unrelated except for Wales' involvement in each.

Wales announced plans for the project last year and said he wanted to provide an open alternative to Google.

Wikia Search uses a social networking model, allowing users to create profiles, select friends, share photos, and manage privacy preferences in addition to providing traditional search capabilities. Users can click on an option to start or participate in discussions about search rankings and write mini-articles about search terms.

"Today marks a significant, albeit initial step in our project to build a search engine," Wales, co-founder and chairman of Wikia, said in an announcement. "For the better part of the past year we've been working in the background to get to the stage we're at today -- an open-to-everyone alpha. We expect Wikia Search to be like fine wine in that it will get better and better as time goes by and more and more people contribute. I've said before that Internet search must be more open and transparent and today marks a major milestone in our mission to make it just that."

Wikia Search said that queries are protected and no user search data is retained.

Wikia works with the Internet Systems Consortium, a nonprofit corporation supporting Internet infrastructure, which received more than 2,400 CPUs to build an open search index. Wikia said the cluster will be community organized and provide open access to all resources it produces including indexes and compressed crawl data. It uses open technologies like Grub, Nutch, Hadoop, hBase, and Foowi.

"We believe that a completely open foundation must drive the future of search, following the same principles as the Internet and Web that it builds upon," Jeremie Miller, founder of Jabber and Wikia Search architect, said in a statement. "Search is becoming one of the most powerful tools humankind has ever created -- only transparency and open participation will protect these tools from abuse."

The search engine will rely heavily on user participation and, for that reason, those launching the site did so with a bit of humility.

"Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data," Wikia Search explained on its Web site Monday. "So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often."

The site encourages users to comment liberally through mini-articles, feedback, and by reporting bugs.