• by Martin Laetsch , January 10, 2008

There was significant change during 2007 in the online marketing space. The major search engines went on a buying spree, search and online marketing finally became a legitimate part of the media mix for large companies in almost every vertical, and social media became mainstream.

This year is shaping up to be even more impactful to the online marketing space. The first major news is the Jan. 7 alpha launch of Wikia search. This is the latest project from Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia. This time, his plan is to apply collaborative tools to build a better search engine than Google. This ambitious plan is worth watching, but probably won't change the search landscape much in 2008.

What makes Wikia search so interesting is the radical departure from standard search engine thinking. Instead of using the resources of a single company to crawl the Web and index the results with a complicated, undisclosed algorithm, Wikia is using the social media expertise gained with Wikipedia to index and rank results. This is an interesting idea and may work out, but it has the potential for serious abuse. In Monday's New York Times, Miguel Helft reports "the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to 'block them, ban them, delete their stuff,' just as other wiki projects do."

The potential problems become even more pronounced when considering how sites are indexed. Wikia was released with a "placeholder index" with a limited number of sites. Wikia is making the Grub distributed crawler available, enabling site owners to crawl their own data. This allows companies to ensure their content is included in the index, but will probably limit non-commercial content. Unless Wikia starts aggressively crawling content on its own, it runs the risk of becoming just an advertising search engine.

If this happens, people will use it for self promotion, but very few searchers will turn to it to look for information. If searchers aren't actively using Wikia, companies will stop spending time updating the index and the Wikia search project will become an interesting footnote in online marketing history. If the Wikia team goes to a truly hybrid solution by aggressively crawling the Web and building out a comprehensive index that rivals the other search engines and then supplements the index with results from the site owners, it has a chance to revolutionize the industry.

If Wikia is successful, advertisers, large and small, will be interested. In order for these advertisers to take the next step and invest time and resources to include Wikia in their media mix, some key questions need to be addressed:

1) Will advertisers be able to micro-target their audience to make Wikia as cost effective as current search engine marketing?

2) Will advertisers have transparency into pricing?

3) Will advertisers have the data to enable them to optimize performance?

4) What pricing model(s) will be available?

5) Will Wikia be as cost efficient as existing search engines?

If Wikia can answer these questions to advertiser satisfaction and deliver search results as good as existing solutions, it can start to grow its market share. This, in turn, will further increase the complexity of search marketing beyond what it is today, which will require robust technology solutions to effectively manage search and online marketing programs.

Regardless, Wikia will probably get a lot of initial traffic and interest due to the success of Wikipedia and the novelty of the ranking system, but market success will be limited unless Wikia can provide a better experience than Google, which is unlikely in 2008. Unlike Wikipedia, it is entering a very crowded area with established alternatives that work just fine for the end user.

Martin Laetsch is senior director of search strategy at SEMDirector, Inc., a software firm that builds search marketing automation technologies for large advertisers to gain visibility into the effectiveness of their paid and organic search programs. He brings more than 10 years experience of developing global search programs at Intel Corporation. Laetsch is on the Board of Advisors at SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, and is a founding member of the Google Technology Leadership Council, dedicated to best practices for technology search marketers.