Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, is hoping to threaten Google’s dominance over internet search with the launch of Wikia Search, a project spearheaded by the founder of on of the webs most popular websites.
“Right now in the US in particular we have a really strong concentration of the industry,” Wales said Thursday at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.
More than 90 percent of searches in the United States are carried out on one of three search engines: Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
Many people in the industry have begun sounding their concern over the concentration of the search market into so few competitors, and especially the overall dominance of Google among the three.
“So a lot of people are really concerned about this… Do we really want all of our traffic, all of our editorial control of the Internet all being piped through one, two or three companies?” Mr. Wales asked. His answer is: No, we don’t.
Unlike the major search engines which keep their technology and ranking algorithms under tight wraps, Wikia will be on an open platform, following the same principles of Wikipedia, where users can edit, change and flag entries made by others.
The idea is for users to participate in meaningful ways when browsing, but so far the Wikia Search hasn’t come online, and to date there has been no information released about the possibility of the new and open platform for search engine marketing advertisers.
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