The other day I came across an interview between Danny Sullivan (formerly of SearchEngineWatch.com, now with SearchEngineLand.com) and Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikia. In case you didn’t know, Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia. And if you don’t know what Wikipedia is, you really should come out from under that rock occasionally (it’s really nice out here!)

What the interview is about is an ambitious new project called “Search Wikia,” where Wales and his team will apply what they’ve learned from running the world’s largest and most authoritative collaborative content site. They’ll use those lessons to build a search engine that they hope will shape into a big, bad “Google-Killer”.

The full plan hasn’t been formulated yet, and Wales admits that in already talking to the press that he might have let the cat out of the bag before they were ready to have any real public scrutiny of the project. They hope to muster the same sort of passionate human community around their new search engine as they’ve built up around Wikipedia.

In theory, it seems like a nice enough idea. Right?

Yes and no. What I really loved was that Sullivan pulls no punches when discussing what he feels are the shortcomings in Wales’ ideas. He discusses what he perceives to be Wales’ short-sightedness on the realities involved with running a world-class search site. Especially the nitty-gritty details of what actual physical hardware and funding is required to get the job done.

Sullivan does say that he’s hopeful that — even though he doubts “Search Wikia” actually put Google out of business — the community-participation aspects could certainly make some interesting changes to the search industry.

I know I’ll be watching!

The link to that article is here:
http://searchengineland.com/061229-193718.php

One more note about Wikipedia. As I was writing this up, I came across another article just this week about how Wikipedia will be re-instating the policy of making all outbound links use the “nofollow” attribute in response to widespread abuse by spammers. Normally, vandalizing Wikipedia in order to leech PageRank isn’t worth it, because a human editor will catch you.

But this past holiday season, a ton of sites had SEO Contests with prizes like info-product packages and even cash. In those cases, you have a bunch of unscrupulous SEO practitioners who want high-PR page rank and they want it fast, and they don’t care if it’s temporary. So unethical marketers would then “vandalize” Wikipedia entries with unrelated links in the hopes of catching a spider before a human editor removed the offending link.

And how do I put this….that just SUCKS!

What that means is the ton of people who have built real, informative entries about their businesses and services now have the value of that investment taken away from them. Hopefully, this measure will only be temporary, as it was the last time Wikipedia used “nofollow”. I know it’s a waste to hope that unethical marketers will knock off this kind of activity, because they aren’t likely to stop. I just hope that the people who sponsor these SEO Contests will make it less rewarding to do so and give some thought to the damage such free-for-all contests can cause in the Internet Marketing eco-system.

The link to that article is here:
http://www.ineedhits.com/free-tools/blog/2007/01/wikipedia-fights-black-hat-seo-with.aspx