Why Is This Man Smiling?

Google's genius has been that its machine-muscled method reflected a lot of good information about how real people were reacting to its search results. Google's brightest innovation, hatched by cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were still graduate students at Stanford, was for search engines to rank Web pages based partly on the number of other pages that linked to them, using that as an indicator of relevance, usefulness, and importance. But that has been an easy game for hucksters to play, since it costs very little to create countless dummy Web pages solely intended to generate links to the commercial sites you want to promote. This is why search results can so often disappoint users. Silicon Valley insiders whisper rumors that the "link farm" problem recently forced Google to move away from relying so much on links as a major influence on search rankings. Instead, it's reportedly focusing on analyzing what people click on and the content of Web pages. The latter is exactly what Wales believes people can do better than machines.

If Wikia can find a better way, there's a good chance that it can gain real popularity. But that's a big "if," says Peter Wayner, the author of Free for All, a history of the open-source software movement. "The fascinating question is, How are you going to do it better than Google? If you put humans in the loop, maybe that will stop the gaming. But what if the humans are corrupt? Humans are as likely to be biased." Wales, for his part, has tended to downplay the spam problem he might face, without offering a concrete plan beyond relying on the community to figure it out. His Wikipedia experience might be enough. "The way Wikipedia deals with saboteurs is to change them, not to crush them," says Tapscott. "They find something good about them and embrace it. This attitude is what you need to make this work."

No matter how much anyone believes that Wales may be engaged in a quixotic enterprise, they're rooting for him. They want an alternative. "Someone should try to make the next big leap in search," says Dave Winer, who pioneered the popular RSS feeds for media distribution over the Internet. "Even if there are reasons to believe that Wales's effort will fail, I'm glad he's trying. We need more people who don't accept the hype and are willing to try to get to the next level."

Great business leaders do fall. Remember when IBM reaped 70% of all the money spent on computers? When GM controlled 60% of the U.S. auto market? When Sony, not Apple, dominated portable music? In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that long ago that the war for online dominance was between CompuServe and Prodigy. And it was thought to be a winner-take-all market. "The Internet just blew that wide open," says Wales. "Actually, I suspect that we probably dodged a bullet there in the sense that the Internet just existed and some of the players realized, if it's winner take all, we're better off letting our customers talk to each other over the Internet. There's a certain compelling logic to it."

Rome fell, the British Empire fell, and it's possible that even Google will fall too. This time, when Jimbo Wales tries to compete with Larry Page, he may get body-dragged relentlessly, or worse, slammed fatally against the rocks. Or he might jump and fly gloriously through the open air. Either way, it's going to be a wild ride.

Alan Deutschman (adeutschman@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer.