Wikia vs Google?

The April issue of Fast Company has a feature article by Alan Deutschman about Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and his new idea to build a search engine to rival Google. This search engine is definitely several years down the road though.

I’m a little bit confused because it kept calling it Wikia, but what Wikia is now is something different… so I assume it will change. I’m not sure why they’re replacing what it is now, but I did see Wikia Search. For something interesting, trying Googling “wikia” and then try Wiki-ing “wikia”.

Interesting parts of the article:
Apparently Google used to post “proud signs” that said how many webpages it served…until the number became too large to track with any level of reliability.

One person say Wales may be underestimating how hard it is to do search. Wales will have to meet Google’s level of succes before he can try to surpass it.

Is there a future for niche-market search engines? (i.e. Zillow helps you find real estate, Technorati searches blogs) Let’s hope Wales keeps his eyes on the big picture because I personally am not a fan of having the niche-market mentality catering to every little whim!

People-based vs Machine-based - Back in the day searches like Yahoo had real people categorizing sites (and thus determining where it turns up on the search) but then the Web exploded. Google’s approach has been a machine-based method to determine how people react to search results and using that to categorize the position of listed pages.

Anyway, that is just my quick, not-terribly-technological overview. Please check out the April 2007 issue of Fast Company. What are your thoughts? Let me know!