Wikia plans editable Web search engine
Wikia Inc., the San Mateo company co-founded by Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, plans to challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. with a search engine that lets users edit and fine-tune its results. — The goal for the project is to get 5 percent of the search market …
Context & Ripple Effects
The plan Jimmy Wales first floated in December 2006 — reported then by the Times of London as a Wikipedia founder's bid to rival Google — has hardened into a company-level commitment: Bloomberg now reports that Wikia Inc., his San Mateo startup, intends to ship a search engine whose results users can edit and fine-tune directly.
What makes the March 2007 announcement notable is the specificity: rather than positioning itself as another algorithmic challenger, Wikia is staking its case on openness and community curation, and Wales has set a measurable target of capturing 5 percent of the search market from Google and Yahoo.
First-order effects
- Google and Yahoo face a challenger competing on transparency rather than index size — Wikia's bet is that letting users edit rankings differentiates it in a market where both incumbents treat their algorithms as trade secrets.
- Wikia must immediately recruit a critical mass of volunteer editors, since an editable results page is only credible if a community actually maintains it — the same bootstrapping problem Wikipedia solved and any new wiki project struggles with.
Second-order effects
- Openly editable rankings create an obvious incentive for search spammers and SEO operators to manipulate results, forcing Wikia to build governance and anti-abuse mechanisms before launch rather than after.
- If the 5-percent target looks plausible, other search players come under pressure to expose more of their own ranking logic, since 'black-box relevance' becomes the thing Wikia is campaigning against.
Third-order effects
- If community-edited search gains traction, it points toward search as shared infrastructure — transparent, openly licensed indexes curated by volunteers — rather than a proprietary asset held by two or three companies.
- The 5-percent framing matters structurally: even a modest share concentrated among early adopters could sustain an alternative search ecosystem, much as Wikipedia proved a volunteer-run reference work could sit alongside commercial encyclopedias.
The trend: Search is beginning to split between proprietary black-box algorithms and open, community-curated alternatives, with Wikia's editable engine the clearest test yet of whether the Wikipedia model transfers to Web search.