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Will Google Be Destroyed By Open Source Search Engines?
Could open source kill the golden egg that laid Google? If Wikia has its way, it just might. The Wikia project, started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, seeks to turn the process of building a search engine from a multimillion dollar project to one that could cost just hundreds or thousands of bucks. That's a game changer. Here is a look at what Wikia hopes to accomplish:
Well, how will Wikia be able to provide all this search engine technology and service -- especially crawling the Web -- for free? Open user participation, of course:
If I have any skepticism about Wikia, it centers on this piece. I know that distributed computing and its white-hot offspring, grid computing, are big IT trends (and that they can work), but crawling the Web is the competitive advantage that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft use to maintain their market share. Will a mishmash of random crawls from across the Web really be an adequate substitute to a centralized effort? We'll have to wait and see. As for Wikia itself, I think that even if the distributed Web crawling doesn't work as well as Google, just having that option available -- along with open and free search engine parts -- will be the catalyst that both vertical search and the local search advocates have been looking for. In May I predicted that Google would die not from direct competition with a new, direct rival but from the challenges posed by an army of thousands of tiny niche search engines and Web apps. We've seen Technorati and Blinkx beat Google at its newer search initiatives. How many more little search engines will we see once Wikia goes live? « Thumbs Surgically Altered For iPhone? Think Again | Main | Groklaw's Pamela Jones On The SCO Decision » |
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