Wikia looking to topple Google, but will fail miserably
The CEO of Wikia, a search engine launching soon with an open algorithm, has been talking big for a long time now. Unfortunately for Gil Penchina, not much scares Google — they will just get more aggressive.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wikia's search push has been telegraphed for a year: Jimmy Wales told the Times of London back in December 2006 he intended to build a search engine to rival Google, and by March 2007 Bloomberg reported the concrete shape of it — an editable Web search engine where users could inspect and modify the ranking. Gil Penchina has spent the run-up talking up the challenge, with the launch now imminent.
This column takes the opposite bet: that an open algorithm changes nothing about Google's dominance and only provokes more aggression. It is one voice in a familiar genre — Wired was asking "Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone." as far back as November 2005 — but the question it raises is real: does transparency beat scale in search?
First-order effects
- Wikia ships a search engine whose ranking algorithm is open and community-editable, making transparency its core product feature rather than a side promise.
- Google loses nothing measurable at launch, but Wikia hands every critic and competitor a public test case of how good non-black-box relevance can be.
Second-order effects
- If Wikia's editable rankings surface obvious gaming or spam, the openness pitch inverts into a liability argument that incumbents will cite against any transparent-ranking challenger.
- Other second-tier engines gain a template: differentiate on governance and auditability of results rather than trying to out-crawl Google.
Third-order effects
- A sustained open-algorithm effort would turn 'how results are ranked' into a consumer-facing issue, pressuring closed-ranking incumbents to justify their opacity — a fight over qualification criteria as a moat rather than index size.
- Whether community-edited search survives determines if search competition fragments into ideology-driven niches or stays consolidated around scale players like Google.
The trend: Search challengers are testing openness and community governance as a wedge against incumbents whose moat is opaque, scale-driven relevance.