Why Is This Man Smiling?

With Wikia, which launched in 2004, Wales has expanded metaphorically from the encyclopedia to a library full of other books, all created and edited by online collaboration with free tools and Web hosting from the company. Its ad-supported sites get into much greater detail about specific topics: Muppets fans, for instance, have contributed more than 13,000 articles to Wikia's Muppets site. Ironically, Wikia relies on text ads generated by Google, so Search Wikia is biting the hand that feeds it (Wikipedia, for its part, gets about one-third of its traffic from referrals from Google's search engine).

Google Is More Vulnerable Than You Think…

Only 21% of professionals always feel that search engines understand their queries

10% always find exactly what they want on the first attempt

…But Without a Viable Alternative, People Bang Their Head Against the Wall

93% of users tend to search again using a new query with similar meaning at the same search engine rather than switch to a new one

(Source: Convera, November 2006)

Even though Wikipedia gets the media attention, Wikia is growing even more quickly and could become the bigger creation. Already Wikia's 500,000 articles makes it bigger than the French Wikipedia, and its momentum will soon help it surpass the German Wikipedia and will then put it in contention with the English Wikipedia. "Jimmy is a fiercely competitive guy," says Don Tapscott, who got to know Wales while researching his best-selling book Wikinomics. "And he's a staunch defender of his ideas." After all, Wales has never cooperated with China's efforts to censor Wikipedia even while Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all acquiesced.

People's faith in Wales stems from his often-overlooked leadership abilities. "Jimbo really left his hands off the typical control knobs that a manager would use to control a company [with Wikipedia]," says Henri Poole, a veteran Web entrepreneur who's on the board of the Free Software Foundation and knows Wales personally. "He's a cyberspace diplomat and a master at it." As evidence, Poole says that one reason for Wales's success at Wikipedia was how he let the Wikipedians create different types of governance structures to fit with the local cultures of the different countries around the world. "He has the confidence to let something go," adds Tapscott. Wales's success or failure will come from how well he encourages his community's inventiveness.

Wales is a champion of the open-source movement's public-spirited idealism, and he emphasizes that Search Wikia's inner workings will be "transparent" to everyone--rather than secretive, like Google's. He views it philosophically, and much like Wikipedia, saying, "This is fundamental, basic information about the world. It needs to be neutral, and there needs to be an accountable, transparent, public dialogue about how it's created." If the processes were open to inspection and debate, Wales feels that people would put more trust in the results. "I trust Google reasonably well," he says, "but that's like saying you have a favorite politician. I trust this politician, but I still want the city council to meet publicly. I still want a certain transparency in how government is run, even if you trust the person who's in charge now."

It's that sense of grandiose mission and deep-rooted belief that may make Wales the most dangerous of the many challengers in the search business. Between 2002 and the third quarter of 2006, more than 170 search startups received more than $1 billion from venture capitalists (they're so pervasive these days that Wikia's headquarters in San Mateo, California, happens to be located downstairs from Oodle, another search startup). Many of those newcomers are simply hoping to get a tasty crumb of the $20.7 billion search advertising pie. The most promising strategy seems to be focusing on a niche that Google overlooks--Zillow, for example, specializes in searches for house-sale listings.

Wales, for his part, is trying something much bigger and more ambitious. He has already amassed an army of volunteers who are contributing to Wikia and who can now be leveraged for the search project as well. But it's not the first time that a "people-powered" search engine like this has been attempted, and the others have mostly faded or languished in obscurity--Infrasearch (backed by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen), Magellan, the Open Directory Project. Yahoo, of course, had hundreds of employees who categorized Web sites in the '90s, but the Web quickly became so enormous that Yahoo's people could review only a sliver of it, a problem that will surely be faced by Wales's Search Wikia--and one reason Google's approach won out.