Jimmy Wales, the founder of the popular Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has revealed more details about the development of his new for-profit search engine Wikia. During the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) held in Portland, Jimmy Wales announced the acquisition of from search engine LookSmart and the release of the software under open source.

Grub, a distributed search spidering technology, will enable Wikia to index the millions of websites on the internet.

“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder and chairman, Wikia, Inc. “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.” [Wikia]

LookSmart will be providing text and display ads in Wikia’s free wiki communities and eventually on the Search Wikia site, Wales said. Wikia will sell ads a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-thousand (CPM) models. Unsold inventory will be back-filled by ads from LookSmart’s distributed ad network.