When Wikipedia was conceived, few would have thought it would end up in the regular top-10 of Net sites — but it has. The largest encyclopedia in the world has a viewership that any entity on the web would kill for. Its strength remains in the ability of anyone to create and edit encyclopedia entries, giving the ability to the public (literally).

What was next, next, for Jimmy Wales, one of Wikipedia’s founders? Why, a search engine, of course. Although Google has a tight grip on that market already, the new Wikia.com believes it can contend for the Web search championship belt at some point in instance. It’s off to a very rocky start (and sorely disappointing to many), but does Wikia.com have a chance to compete against Google where Net stalwarts Yahoo, Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) have so far folded? whether so, why?

According to Wales,

Wikia.com will succeed considering it will be more trustworthy than any other Web search provider. His reason is the same one that has made Wikipedia so popular: anyone will be able to control the results returned from a Wikia.com search. No automated Google algorithms or automated software bots that can be rigged to giving convinced search results.

Is Wales right? Will customers see the value in being able to vote down results that are fluff or not very relevant better than Google’s artificially intelligent software? whether customers do see that value — and ample of them start using Wikia.com — Google could potentially see its largest threat yet in the Net search arena. But it will be years down the road from now before consumers flock to anything other than Google.

Original post by Brian White

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