Why Is This Man Smiling?

Despite its wealth and mystique, though, Google is surprisingly vulnerable, creating an opportunity for a guy like Wales. Google doesn't have an effective method of locking in its customers the way earlier info-tech leaders did: Once you're using Microsoft's operating system or Oracle's database, switching to a rival's software means a considerable cost in time and money, as well as untold aggravation. But trying out a different search engine than Google involves no more than typing in a different short word in the address bar of your Web browser.

What's more, studies show that users are disappointed with the current state of search and consider Google hardly any better than its rivals. In a blind study by the French linguistics scholar Jean Véronis and his students, Google and Yahoo tied for user satisfaction with their results, both scoring an embarrassing 2.3 out of a possible 5. About 28% of the time, users thought that all the search results they received from both engines were "totally useless." They gave fairly low marks of 2.8 and 2.9 even to the very first links listed by Yahoo and Google, respectively. About a quarter of the time, they didn't find what they considered to be even one good result from either search engine.

Just how is Wales going to do it? Even he doesn't really know--at least not yet. That's part of the process of mass collaboration. When Wales began his encyclopedia project in 2001, he started by commissioning articles from experts and subjecting them to peer review before he hit on the much faster approach of letting anyone write and edit. And he dealt with the unfolding problems, such as accuracy and vandalism, as he went along. This time around, with Search Wikia, he's starting out with an intriguing idea and an invitation to the Internet community to take part in shaping it in unexpected ways.

The community has responded quite enthusiastically so far, catching even Wales by surprise. "I just thought we'll put a couple of developers on it and kind of play with it on the side and see what comes up," he says. "But now there's a huge developer community that's really interested." As Gil Penchina, Wales's handpicked CEO to lead Wikia, says, "Since the news leaked out, people have been lining up, saying, 'I'll clean the toilet bowl, let me in here.'"

And the caliber of the toilet cleaners is very strong: They range from Mark Schellhase, age 13, a whiz kid in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to William Surowiec, 64, who loves programming and did it every day through a 42-year career until his position at a big New York publishing company was cut last summer. Surowiec considered retirement, he says, but "bluntly, it sucks. I want to code. I want to be in the action, to be part of a team competing to do something interesting and do it well." In between, there are PhD students, such as Gérard Dupont in Rouen, France, who've been working on search technology. "When they finish their dissertation, they will probably be looking for a job at Google," Wales says, "but for now they don't have access to the real cutting-edge research there, so they're happy to meet up with people and participate in an experimental project. So that's kind of cool."

Wikipedia had 164,675,000 unique visitors in December 2006, ranking sixth on the web and reflecting a 107% growth rate over last year

More than 75,000 Wikipedians have edited 5 or more articles in the last month (as of October 2006)

(Source: comScore Media Metrix)

Wales also has the somewhat radical idea of banding together Google's rivals to upend the search giant. "The other thing we're looking to is some of the second-tier search companies," he admits. "We've talked to--I can't say who--different people, asking, would they be better off participating in a project that helps quality search results to become a commodity?" The idea is that no one on their own can compete with Google's resources to catch up in terms of the quality of search, but together, they could render that moot and compete on brand and user interface. Early this year, Wikia was rumored to be in discussions with Ask.com.

Wikia will need all the help it can get, because building a great search engine is far more daunting than building an encyclopedia. Major players such as Google and Yahoo index tens of billions of Web pages. (Google used to post proud signs proclaiming the actual number it had served--like McDonald's with hamburgers--until that figure became too impossibly large to keep track of with any kind of reliability.) Searching the Web takes computational brawn, which is why Google runs huge numbers of networked computers in vast warehouses. It takes exceptional brainpower, too, which is why Google has lured an impressive cadre of top computer scientists to write the sophisticated algorithms, that make the difference between really useful results and crap. "Jimbo Wales is completely underestimating how hard it is to do search," says Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com.