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.

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.

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.

I can see a company with a business model like www.searchenginecorp.com being more of a Google competitor than wikia.

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.

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...

it would be great see. Google is abusing its power

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.