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According to reports in the San Jose Mercury News, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is looking to build a "a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google." His company, Wikia, has just purchased technology to create such an engine.
As you know, many SEO type folks do not like Wikipedia. Can this open source search engine really compete with Google?
Moderator EGOL at Cre8asite Forums puts his thoughts quite succinctly:
Have you watched the content of a wikipedia topic? Lots of goals, lots of agendas, some extremely competent get edited by idiots.......... let that compete with a company that is highly motivated by performance, assessment and profits.
The doubt is echoed at Search Engine Watch Forums. Many people feel that it's not going to be much better than Mahalo, which is already being ridiculed by the SEO community.
More information is posted at GigaOM.
Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums and Search Engine Watch Forums.
Comments:
Matt Ellsworth
07/30/2007 03:21 pm
I saw this as well - I downloaded the client they were talking about (grub) but it doesn't run for windows. The one cool thing I thought about it was that you could upload a keyfile to your sites and have your client crawl your sites... which would be useful for marketing if you ran lots of large sites.
No Name
07/30/2007 08:57 pm
Interesting idea. As much as I hate wiki I like the idea of a little google competition. I think the main plus in having some google competition is that a bite out of google’s traffice would force google to make more of the really high PPC ads available for adsense publishers vs. hogging all the really good click throughs for google searches.
James Burns
08/01/2007 01:49 am
It sounds like a good idea. Competition is always a good thing, it seems to raise everyones standards, and forces everyone to think in different ways. Wicki has some up sides and some down sides, but so does google. a little high profile competition might force both to work on some of the rough spots. I can see some good coming from this, and don't see any bad side.
Sky
08/01/2007 02:28 pm
I can see a company with a business model like www.searchenginecorp.com being more of a Google competitor than wikia.
Shams
08/02/2007 03:12 pm
It will be difficult to compete with Google. G is very efficient and truly business oriented. When you go open source, people will not feel secured. That`s the problem with W.
Ant Onaf
08/03/2007 08:38 pm
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Wikipedia has been favored and an authority site on Google for a while now. I wonder if Jimmy is getting a little big headed and cocky trying to compete with its Daddy! Maybe Google will put a chile in a child's place, by dumping Wikipedia as a authority site! Ouch! that gotta hurt...
kimmy
03/30/2008 07:44 pm
it would be great see. Google is abusing its power
Jacques
03/31/2008 07:33 am
There was prior talk of Google coming up with its own version of wikipedia, with the preferential treatment that has been accorded to wikipedia set to drop away. Perhaps this is wikipedia's response in trying to secure their market. Agreed that wikipedia has some SEOrious flaws, but competition is good, especially for the Google monster.