Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has his sights set on creating an open alternative to Google's search engine.

Wales’ Wikia project aims to provide community resources for building and organising free content on every topic and has unveiled its next steps in its work to build a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration.

Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source licence for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal.

"We've had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space," said Wales.

"The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses. Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box."

Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system. By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.

"In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future," said Michael Grubb, senior vice president of technology of LookSmart.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Wikia and believe that Grub will thrive under an open source licence. We are happy to be able to assist in the movement to make search a more open proposition and look forward to seeing things progress from here."