Wikia Inc., the San Mateo company co-founded by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, plans to challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. with a search engine that lets users edit and fine-tune its results. The goal for the project is to get 5 percent of the search market, Gil Penchina, chief executive officer of Wikia, said Thursday in an interview. He doesn't know when the service will be released.

Wikia users will collaborate to build an index of Web sites that anyone can edit. They also will be able to fix search results if they don't give useful information, he said. The site will probably include some advertising, Penchina said. U.S. companies spent $6.95 billion on Internet-search ads in 2006, a 35 percent rise from the year before, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.

Wikia, which has 33 employees, is funded by investors such as the online retailer Amazon.com Inc., Netscape Communications Inc. co-founder Marc Andreessen and venture-capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners.

WikiSeek should not be confused with Wikia’s upcoming search engine (although I did). Both, however, are developing community-edited search engines, and both have received assistance from Wikipedia (Wikia, though, is co-founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales).

And while Wikia pushed some more vaporware news last week about their own upcoming community edited search engine, WikiSeek quietly launched an actual product.

The main WikiSeek search engine shows results only from Wikipedia and sites linked from Wikipedia. The new community edited search engine, which they stress is experimental only at this stage, can be found at community.wikiseek.com and the results can be edited by anyone. There are a number of throttles on the service - for example, only ten results are delivered currently.