Jimmy Wales: The New Wikia Search API “Is Like Facebook Apps For Search Results.”

Jimmy Wales is opening up the Wikia Search engine to anyone who wants their own data or application to show up in results. Called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions (WISE), it lets developers create search results based on certain keywords or rules. Wales tells me: It is like Facebook Apps for search results. Wikia Search is launching the WISE framework with a bunch of partners: Digg (returns recent frontpage headlines as results), Indeed (for job search), Kayak (for travel searches), Last.fm (for music searches), and even Twitter (relevant Tweets). The other partners at launch will be AccuEather, AcronymFinder, Amie Street, Creative Commons (CC images), PleaseDressMe (T-shirt results) Thomson Reuters, Snooth (wine), and Yelp (local reviews). Partners can customize results not just for keywords, but create their own search apps. (Kayak's, for instance, let's you enter departing and returning dates when you search for a flight). So like Yahoo BOSS and Search Monkey , WISE lets developers change both the result ranking and the look and feel of customized results. In fact, anything that can be written in HTML can turn up as a result.