As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, along with Amazon aim to develop a new search engine challenging both Google and Yahoo, the two search giants are fighting back with innovations of their own.
Jimmy Wales' idea is to develop a search engine that relies heavily on users to refine the search results. Google introduced Co-op to do just that, using users as a source for search results. Yahoo aims at building the same network of users who are building search results through its My Web initiative. Both Yahoo My Web and Google Co-op are still in beta.
My personal opinion is that the push given by Amazon to Jimmy Wales' idea will still not be able to dethrone Google or Yahoo from their high thrones in the search engine kingdom. They will just fight back ferociously with the same idea of Jimmy Wales, using the knowledge of users in an online social networking setting to build and refine their search engine results. The good news is that the push by Jimmy Wales and Amazon however will make the move towards this take place sooner, which means a better search experience for users.
Have a look at Jimmy Wale's budding search engine.
