• Wired News, Tuesday, January 2, 2007 11 AM

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales believes his next wiki project could become powerful enough to take on Google.

Wales' vision of a totally transparent social search engine could prove to be the ultimate extension of Google's original vision: Organize the world's content, and make it searchable. Google ranks its results based on how many links a given page receives--a system that's prone to trickery and hacking.

Wales hopes the participation of the Web community will eliminate those problems, although wikis, as we know, are even more open to such tinkering. In reality, wiki-based sites like Wikipedia rely on a complicated managerial hierarchy to make sure accurate information isn't messed with.

The idea is fundamentally open-source, says Wales. "Developers, users, or anyone who wants to can come and see how we're doing things and give us advice and information about how to make things better."

How do you manage something like this? Wales admits that he has no idea, nor does he know how the human-powered ranking element would work. There was no mention of how he plans to monetize the project, either.

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