Google has been the undisputed king of search for an online eternity, having risen from the bloody search engine wars of the early Web with only heavyweights like Yahoo and Microsoft left able to compete (remember HotBot? Dogpile? AltaVista?). Well look out Mountain View, here comes Jimmy Wales and a legion of open sourcers with the Wikia project, which seeks to build an organic search engine that may spawn hundreds of rivals for Google’s core service. Wikia may not be a the giant dinosaur-killing meteor, but rather a shower of meteors that blast the lids off of all the SEO jobs and little businesses who have carved niches for themselves on the single premise of gaming Google’s engine. But wait, there’s more…
Google has expanded like crazy since adding advertising into the core business that made their brand name synonymous with online searching. With a slew of applications and services, killer R&D, and an innovation culture that makes them possibly the most enlightened company on the planet, it could be said that they’ve diversified enough to protect the company from challenges to search. But have they taken the focus off their identity. The portal wars of the dot com boom and bust were all padding around core searching services. Google won by focusing on search with a laser precision and doing it better than anyone else, simply, effectively, completely. But the online world is the true competitive market. How long could Google stay unchallenged.
Technorati and Blinx have both created niche search products that are better than Google and nibble away very effectively at the core. Sure Google could buy them up, but they won’t be able to buy their way out of a money punch delivered by a free open source community. So the question is, can Jimmy start a search revolution and knock the king off the mountain?
Wikia’s search premise is architected around peers downloading crawlers and shipping the data back home to take the cost burden of having a massive indexing server farm out of the picture. Like bittorrent, it would depend on lots of little peers hosting the apps and chipping in out of the goodness of their hearts, cycles and bandwidth. That may or might not work, most likely it would create a little hacker counter culture who get into it.
But what if publishing/broadcasting/content/advertising companies got into this search game from the local and corporate level? Now that would paint a very different picture. Leveraging resources to reclaim and win the local search battle in a manageable business case while shipping up the crawl to the collective could be a win-win-win that tipped the scales back to their favor. Face it, the Goog has been eating that lunch for years now, and selling it back to publishers for a penny per hundred clicks while keeping a pocket of change for themselves… pennies that used to all belong to the local media shop.
Rather than share fifty percent of the online revenue pie with search engine-driven ad sellers and paying them to market yourself at the same time, Wikia may offer the golden opportunity to band together and start creating local search products in house that can offer a higher share of online revenue.
The next step would be wikiads. The .com is parked by a squatter, and the .org redirects to ebay (no links for you!). Jimmy, John… any thoughts?
