Wikia -A Future Google Killer?

You know that there is a change in the air when Wikipedia and Amazon.com hook up. And that is exactly what has happened recently, with Amazon providing a $10m grant to Wikia, an offshoot of Wikipedia, run by Wikimedia, and all created by Jimmy Wales. Yes, there is a lot of Wiki in the world these days…

A brief description is to say that Wikia is a search engine with the same open source-collaborative feel that Wikipedia is based upon. And with the recent purchase of Grub, an open sourced distributed search crawler platform – basically a search engine that relies on the combined computing power of your own PC along with those of everyone else running the Grub software.

It comes in a world where the Web 2.0 boom is actually a well sustained movement, rather than the original .com boom of yesteryear. Amazon’s involvement has already provided a lot of heavy muscle to Jimmy Wales’ new startup, by not only providing cash but name recognition. Of course, with Wikipedia under his belt, Jimmy isn’t necessarily relying on others name recognition.

So the question remains, does Google have anything to worry about?

For so long Google has been the premiere search engine, providing clean and fast search results without the added flare of intricate page designs and flashy advertising. This, if nothing else, has been Google’s prime seller; the clean interface that we have to deal with. Not to mention the sheer pervasiveness of their reach would be foolish though, with Google search bars being incorporated unobtrusively in to both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Wikia has a long way to go, but as with Wikipedia, it has the potential to be something great. Though I doubt that Google will fear the competition yet, seeing as Wikia relies heavily upon the involvement of the vaguely tech savvy, compared to their “anyone can use us” approach.

Posted by Josh Hill

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