Wikia Search will go public in rough form next week.

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 Google does not: 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.

Wales explained that he believes search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet and therefore a fundamental part of culture and human society. He said search should be open, transparent, participatory, and democratic. He said Search Wikia would be free, "as in speech, not as in beer."

Though Wales has expressed a fondness for Google, he has also criticized the search engine and said he wants to encourage Web communities to produce something better. Wales said it is a mistake to obscure things for security.

"If you're relying on people not knowing how the system works, you've got a big problem," he said when announcing his plans for a search engine nearly a year ago.

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.

A "trust network" of users, similar to those who contribute to Wikipedia, will discuss and debate what should come next. As search heads toward greater personalization, Wales believes people can come up with smarter, more relevant searches than machines. He has said that collective wisdom will improve search more than knowing everything about an Internet user.

Wales had planned to use a traditional ad revenue model, but it's unclear how the search engine would protect privacy.