Jimmy Wales aims higher

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wants to shift the internet power base.

Last week his for-profit company, Wikia, announced its purchase of Grub, a web crawler. Grub will be incorporated into Wikia’s search engine, which, like Wikipedia, will seek editorial input from a broad web audience.

“If we can get good quality search results, I think it will really change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers,” Wales told a conference of software developers in Portland, Oregon. “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.”

Wikia has drawn some high-profile investors, including Lotus Development co-founder Mitch Kapor and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

The Search Wikia project is expected to debut in late 2007.

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