Speaking in Singapore, Wales said that Wikia Search offers an alternative to people who are concerned about the influence of the 'big three' - Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

"So a lot of people are really concerned about this... Do we really want all of our traffic, all of our editorial control of the internet all being piped through one, two or three companies?" said Wales.

"I don't think we do... I think we want to have a broader marketplace than that," he added.

However, the latest figures from Hitwise, a web-monitoring firm, reveal that Google has increased its dominance in the US, with seven out of 10 searches conducted on Google's website.

In the UK, Google enjoys even greater dominance; three quarters of all searches are done using its services.

Wikia Search, a free and open-source search engine, was launched in January 2008, but initially it was not well received.

An upgraded version was launched in June with improved screen display including facilities that let you rate, edit and enhance search results, similar to Wikipedia's open source policy.

Last month Cuil, a 'semantic' search engine, entered the market, claiming to index more than 120 billion web pages.

http://re.search.wikia.com
www.cuil.com
www.google.co.uk
www.yahoo.co.uk
www.live.com

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