Why Is This Man Smiling?

Last summer, Sir Richard Branson, the entrepreneur behind the Virgin companies, invited a few of his friends--luminaries such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Peter Gabriel, and Google cofounder Larry Page--to be his guests at Necker, his private island in the Caribbean, for a few days. Branson also summoned Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, the free and wildly popular online encyclopedia that's open to anyone to rewrite and edit. Now, when Wales talks about that heady week, he's quick to mention how he beat Page in a sailing race around the island. But Sir Richard raised the stakes when he invited the Internet boys to join him in a more thrilling and dangerous pursuit: kite surfing.

If you Google "kite surfing," the first search result is a Wikipedia article that describes its kicks--jumping and flying off the water's surface through the open air, towed by a powerful kite at speeds of up to 50 kilometers per hour--as well as its hazards: "A bad landing may result in hard impact leading to serious injury or death."

While Page, a veteran kite surfer, showed off his impressive jumps, the envious Wales took novice's lessons from Branson's staffers. When you first learn to kite-surf, you spend a lot of time "bodydragging"--the kite pulls your dangling torso roughly through the water. It's humiliating, but Wales persisted. "I can't actually say I can do it, but it was fun trying," he says. "It seemed easier once I was trying to do it. It was like, Oh, I kind of see how this works." But then the weather turned foul, and Wales wasn't able to go out on the water. He left the island without matching Page's feats.

A few months later, in December, Wales took a shot at Google, telling a London Times reporter that the dominant Web search engine produced too much "spam and useless crap." His point was that shamelessly self-interested hawkers routinely outsmart Google's system to get their commercial Web sites posted high up in the search results, outranking ones that might prove more informative and useful. Wales revealed that Wikia, his for-profit Silicon Valley startup, was working on Search Wikia, which he touted as "the search engine that changes everything.... Just as Wikipedia revolutionized how we think about knowledge and the encyclopedia, we have a chance now to revolutionize how we think about search." Wales envisions large numbers of real live people--the kind of fervent volunteer brigade that edits Wikipedia--intervening to improve on the machine-generated results that we're used to from Google.

"Help me out, spread the word," Wales posted on Wikia's Web site, and quickly his new search effort received 4 million mentions online and attracted its first 1,000 volunteers. Although Wales says it will be another year or two before they will have a viable search engine up and running, he's publicly previewing a crude, preliminary version this spring.

Google, in response, has confidently taken the high road. "Google has maintained a substantial lead in search quality for the past five years," said a spokesperson, "and we are committed and focused on search to ensure Google continues to offer the best search experience available." But the move has stirred considerable ferment in the rest of Silicon Valley.

Is Wales inspired? His stewardship of Wikipedia certainly imbues him with credibility. He has sustained the culture of the largest mass collaboration attempted yet through the Internet. The sheer scale of Wikipedia, founded only six years ago, is astounding: more than 280,000 current volunteers creating and editing more than 5.3 million encyclopedia entries in more than 100 languages. It would be foolish to underestimate the man who founded the sixth-largest Web site in the world.

Or is Wales delusional? Wikia is a startup with few employees and $4 million in funding from private investors, competing against the most extraordinary corporate success story so far in the Internet era. Google controls nearly 50% of the U.S. search market. It has already defended itself against multibillion-dollar assaults from Yahoo and Microsoft. It had revenues of almost $10 billion last year and earnings of a cool billion last quarter alone. It can tap the energies of 10,000 employees, including two still-young, still-brilliant cofounders. And it holds more than $10 billion in cash and marketable securities and stock worth about $150 billion. In Silicon Valley these days, it seems that everyone wants to work for Google or to sell it their startup, as YouTube recently did for $1.65 billion worth of stock.