From the Wikia Search emailing list:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Jason McCabe Calacanis <jason@calacanis.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 9:13 PM
Subject: [Search-l] Why did Search Wikia Fail, where did it succeed?
To: Mailing list for Search Wikia <search-l@wikia.com>Friends,
I’m thinking of writing up a recap of what went well with Wikia search (nutch/lmprovements) and what didn’t.
Was wondering if in the spirit of disclosure those involved would give a public (or private) accounting… Jason@calacanis.com
Also, Mahalo has some open crawl interest and would love to host this list If it is going to get shut down. Perhaps we should move to a google group before it does?
Note: not looking for Jimmy Wales bashing–just lessons learned.
Best j
No comment. Actually, that’s a lie: how about that stupid email list? I emailed Jimbo and his sidekick and offered them MetaMojo.com (which I pretty much discontinued to focus on WatchMojo.com, wisely), which was based on Nutch/Lucene and they could not even explain what they were up to.
Wales might be a God for investing Wikipedia, but this search project has disaster written all over it. More on Wikisearchwhatever and Mahalo here.
Twitter has been compared to everything from Facebook, to YouTube, and even Google. But the more I read about where the company is headed, the more I think: Wikipedia. The actual comparisons to Wikipedia are more numerous but less obvious than you think (users creating the content, in real time, etc.). But reading VC Todd Sagres’ cavalier take on Twitter’s obvious but opaque revenue model, I wonder: will Twitter be something that could have been worth billions but whose value will lie outside of its proprietary ecosystem?
Wikipedia grew because it was a non-profit, open source encyclopedia. Similarly, Twitter grew (amongst other reasons) because it was a free and its API spawned a thousand of products and services (some/many more useful than itself). So I wonder, if history repeats itself, the Twitter guys might feel a bit like Jimbo Wales does these days: proud of his accomplishment but a bit regretful of not having captured the value that he created.
Time will tell.
A number of seemingly random and independent tidbits of news today, that I think are all rather related.
Storyline #1: Zagat On the Auction Block
Zagat has hired Goldman Sachs in an effort to sell the popular restaurant guide. The company has become synonymous with dining out with travelers, but the Zagat family has had relatively little success migrating that to other verticals (hotels, for example) and mainly, digital.
Just a few years ago, in 2000, the Zagats sold 33% of their company in a deal that valued their company at $100M.
Eight years later, have they doubled the value? That is the question. No doubt, Zagat will find a buyer. At what price, I don’t know. Surely Goldman Sachs will line up buyers and the Zagat brand will bring out buyers.
But, this raises a good question: the landscape for Zagat is considerably different than it was seven years ago. I’m not suggesting the company is in any trouble… but its inability to bolster its digital and interactive operations has probably made it lose a lot of time and enabled competitors to creep up from the woodwork.
Between 2000 and 2008 is only 8 years, but a lot happens in 8 years.
Storyline #2: Wikipedia Turns 7
I just got an email informing me that Wikipedia today turns 7.
In less than a decade, Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger had the vision and execution to turn their idea into what I would call the single greatest accomplishment thus far on the world wide web. Quite a feat, indeed. I put Wikipedia amongst one of of the 13 most explosive startups ever.
Storyline #3: Prof to Students: Lay off Google, Wikipedia
Wikipedia - and what it represents - has become such a force that professors are actually warning students of its influential and excessive reliance and use.
Storyline #4: Encarta Took Wrong Path
The key with storyline #3 is not Wikipedia (and Google) itself, but what they represent. Google brings the entire world to your fingertips, and Wikipedia has an article seemingly on everything imaginable.
But notice the professor did not warn about online encyclopedia or search engines, but rather, specifically Wikipedia and Google.
Time is money… and in 7 years, Wikipedia has become the de facto encyclopedia to millions of people. Wikipedia, it’s worth noting, in many ways has totally surpassed its DVD Encyclopedia competitor Encarta (66,000 articles). Encarta belongs to MSFT and sells for $45. It’s worth noting that despite Encarta’s success, for Microsoft to make it a paid product is odd because MSFT generates nearly $60B a year in total revenues and is desperately trying to become more and more relevant online. Call me crazy here, but would making Encarta not fully free not help MSFT more than charging $45 a pop?
Just asking.
But, I am not writing this to pick on Encarta, MSFT, Wikipedia or Zagat… I want to connect some dots. Wikipedia’s offline competitor is Britannica, of course. Britannica totally missed the boat by not focusing either on digital (DVD) formats or interactive (Web-based) medium.
Storyline #5: The Britannica Totally Missed the Boat
The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print. It was first published between 1768. That is 340 years old, so slightly older than Wikipedia. To my younger brother’s generation, The Britannica means little (I grew up reading World Book Encyclopedia).
Connecting the dots (humor me), I see Zagat a bit like The Britannica: a wonderful brand that previous generations love and respect, but desperately searching for an identity in the 21st century. Will Zagat find a new home? Sure thing. I’d love to be able to buy it myself and position it online… but at $200M? I’d rather start a new business… less baggage to carry over to the Web, just ask The Britannica.
Conclusions
#1 - Memo to MSFT: you might want to make Encarta free, by the way.
# 2 - Interestingly, in that earlier financing round that valued Zagat at $100M, Allen & Co. investment banker Nancy Peretsman was an investor… so I am surprised to see Zagat go with Goldman and not Allen & Co., who is probably the top M&A bank by cachet and prestige… but what do I know.
# 3 - And if you really like M&A, check out our Top Web M&A Deals of All Time and Our Biggest Mergers and Acquisitions, Ever.
Here’s the press release on Wikipedia, by the way, and more on Wikipedia’s birthday:
=
Wikipedia celebrates its seventh birthday
San Francisco, CA - January 15 - Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit, celebrates its seventh birthday today. Founded on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has become of the world’s ten most visited websites, and the fastest growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia ever created. Currently, the website has nine million articles in over two hundred and fifty languages. It is collaboratively written by volunteers from around the world.
“In a relatively short time, Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most successful collaboratively written websites. We have struck a chord with tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide, all of whom share our dream of empowering citizens worldwide to share in the sum of all human knowledge. Now with a strong international volunteer base, we would like to focus more energy on improving the quality of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The next five years are going to bring many never-seen-before web based initiatives geared towards this goal,” stated Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.
The Wikipedia experiment has repeatedly been acclaimed as a resounding success. Most recently a 2007 study from the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that Wikipedia’s best quality articles are those that have been edited often and by many different people. The report also validated Wikipedia as a “successful collaborative effort”.
Wikipedia and its sister projects have become a virtual library that spans all languages and continents, attracts millions of visitors, and collects information from all corners of the world. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind the project, has begun developing programs and tools that will extend learning and knowledge gathering in the developing world and disadvantaged communities. In Fall 2007 the Foundation held several Wikipedia Academies in South Africa, with the goal of increasing the number of Wikipedias in African languages.
The Wikimedia Foundation has chapters throughout the world, responsible for promoting the projects locally. Currently, chapters are present in Argentina, France, Israel, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.
The content on Wikipedia and its sister projects are under a free license. Content can be modified rapidly and repeatedly, and individuals can build on the material submitted by other editors. As a result, this ensures that the content will never be lost to humankind, and that information remains free and accessible to all.
###
About Wikipedia
The goal of the Wikipedia project is to create free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles.
Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers more than eight million articles in 250 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than two million articles; it’s followed by the German and French editions, each of which contain more than half a million articles. Nine other language editions contain 100,000+ articles, and more than 100 other languages contain 1,000+ articles. Every month, new language editions launch.
Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers. In 2004, Wikipedia won the Webby Award for “Community” and the Prix Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica for “Digital Communities.” Since the start of the project, more than 100,000 registered users have made at least ten edits each, and more than 3.4 million people have created accounts on the English Wikipedia alone.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world’s 10 most-visited websites. The Foundation was created in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation operates the following projects:
Wikipedia, a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Wiktionary, a project to create free content dictionaries and thesauri in every language. Wikiquote, a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Wikibooks, which aims to build a collection of free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. Wikisource, a collection of classic books, laws, and other free works. Wikispecies , a central, extensive species database for taxonomy. Wikinews, with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. Wikiversity, a project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities. Wikimedia Commons, a central repository for free video, images, music, spoken texts, and other free media that can be easily reused by all Wikimedia projects.
All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. All contributions are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (except in Wikinews, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5). This means their content may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.
=
There you have it, the world really is round, cause everything comes full circle.
Last year, just as I was making preparations to attack the biggest bird I had ever come across (ie. before Christmas), Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales said that he would create a Google killer.
One year has passed, with plenty of hyperbole and ridicule, mixed in with impatience and Wikia-confusion, but it looks like the time is nigh (given the emphasis on the word “private” I wasn’t gonna post this, but indeed this email is public, ’tis the actual beta that is meant to remain private, fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la):
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Jimmy Wales <jwales@wikia.com>
Date: Dec 23, 2007 10:04 PM
Subject: [Search-l] private pre-alpha invites available
To: “search-l@wikia.com” <search-l@wikia.com>Ping me if you want one…. we’re launched.
I’m going to be letting people in slowly over the next few days and we
are aiming for a January 7th public launch. We want to run over the
system with help from people to complain about what is broken…Best way to ask is by email, but please don’t be offended if I don’t
answer right away. I am expecting a bit of a flood here.–Jimbo
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See our previous coverage here: Can a For-Profit Search Engine Be Too Open and Transparent to Succeed?
Here’s a Prediction for 2008: a Google shuffle is around the corner and the one most affected will be Wikipedia.org’s results.
More coverage around the Web on the usual suspects:
Web publishers have grown very stingy with links, because since Google’s AdSense launched, traffic really does equal revenue (even at lower levels of traffic). For this reason, the one site that got a lot of free link juice was Wikipedia, because it was a non-profit.
Wikipedia over time became the #1 result from a wide array of topics, as Nick Carr illustrates here.
This could have gone unchanged, frankly, but as Google looks for more and more ways to generate revenue from the Web, it’s no longer logical to funnel traffic to a site that refused to run ads, let alone Google’s billboards.
The “evil” option would be to do a Google Shuffle and make Wikipedia tumble down the organic search results. Clearly, a lot of people would go bonkers. The next step, basically, is to launch a Wikipedia-killer. I’m not sure if this will work, but it might, because writers want to get paid and Google will essentially be siphoning a lot of web pages, content, traffic and revenue from the Web to Google’s properties… but ultimately, I think this has a lot to do with what Jimmy Wales and Wikia will do too. Right now, Wikia is, well, what is Wikia, I don’t even know.
But next time Wales decides to say that he’s building a Google killer, he’ll be more careful. More importantly, I anticipate seeing Wikipedia magically slip down the Google results page in the months and years to come. It won’t be overnight, but if Mr. Carr runs the same comparison in a year or two, my guess is that Wikipedia pages will be MIA, or at least replaced by Feedburner, YouTube, Knol pages… that’s not evil, it’s business.
Google’s been buying up more and more assets away from its core search competency:
Search? Check.
Video inventory? Check.
Software to serve ads? Check.
Feed management? Check.
When it bought Feedburner, it only further encroached itself on organic ad results, after all, with YouTube, Google was showcasing its own properties front and center. I personally never objected to this, because YouTube was in fact a great source of content… so it did not make sense for Google to handicap one of its units to please a vocal minority.
Yesterday, Google attacked Wikipedia by launching a platform that allows writers to create encyclopedia-like pages on topics. There’s definitely a “target: Wikipedia” feel about this.
But I think by now, despite the amount and respect and fear that Google commands and instills respectively, time will tell whether this will succeed or fail, but a couple things come to mind.
Google launched Base, to compete with Craigslist, and that has gone nowhere.
Google launched Checkout, and Paypal has not even noticed a dent in business.
But, after launched Google Video, and that became a #3 in the marketplace, it then threw in the towel and bought YouTube, wisely.
Of course, Google cannot buy Wikipedia (though we did ask what is it worth?)… so this begs the question: will Google do everything to make Knol a winner… or are they laying down the foundation to evaluate an acquisition of Mahalo? After all, Mahalo might not be have all of the traction in the world, but Mahalo was - like YouTube - funded by Sequoia… and that usually created a connection in YouTube’s case from investment to exit, so it might prove to be the case again with Mahalo. Time will tell.
But one thing is certain, I previously wrote:
Advertising is based on matching marketers with an audience given the demographics of the audience (be it readers, listeners or viewers).
But, the audience’s demographics are largely driven by the content. However, the content has historically been created, edited and presented by the publisher.
Translation: Google thinks it has a strategy in place for video advertising, the fastest growing segment in online ads, but to really scale and dominate in display too, it needs to have such content and not simply rely on search.
Over the past year, I’d argued that Digg had become what it sought to replace: a handful ultimately selecting what was worthy of becoming front-page headlines for a large property.
Today, it’s Wikipedia’s turn:
The group is forming itself into two factions: inclusionists and deletionists. The deletionists say that an encyclopedia is not a dumping ground for facts; standards of notability have to be upheld or their pages will fill with trivia. Inclusionists reply that Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it has no space limit and that an entry of interest to just a few people is justified. Niche articles will never trouble most people, since access is through search.
Read more. I knew Wikipedia was in trouble when an editor removed some rather factual, objective excerpts I’d added a handful of topics I’m well versed in: namely (and oddly enough…) Def Leppard, Iran and Alexander the Great (I know… don’t ask). The reason: none given… that line about inclusionists and deletionists is very well put. I don’t think this takes away from Wikipedia’s grand place in Web lore, but for generations going ahead, it won’t be the encyclopedia anyone can edit, it will simply be, well, an encyclopedia, no different really than World Book or Britannica…
Sometimes, the nicest things you can say about someone come across as awfully critical. I say that because this post actually is intended to give a lot of credit to both Jason Calacanis and Jimmy Wales, but a cynic would argue it strives to do the opposite.
This morning it occured to me that Jimmy Wales might have blown his opportunity for redemption, before he even had a chance. I’m hoping I’ll be proven wrong, but we’ll say.
The Background?
Last year, between Christmas and New Year’s, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said that he was looking to rely on humans and open source technology to build a Google-killing search engine. That raised a lot of eyebrows, but it got a lot of people excited. Over the next few months, people rushed to join his army of developers in the attempt to develop an open-source search engine built by legions of programmers. That’s right, people signed up to a mailing list and got cracking. I always wondered: how many Google employees signed up to that list, too?
Frankly, from the get-go, it was a hazy objective with a murky action plan. To his credit, Wales had built one of the most successful social media properties in Wikipedia.org, the world’s largest free encyclopedia, relying on wiki software that allows everyone and anyone to make changes to a text.
Wikia = a for profit Wikipedia
When the plans were being conceived, people were confused as to Wikipedia.org’s role in the new startup, whose name, it was reported by Wikiasari, then Wikia Search. Wikia was the for-profit company Wales had set up to develop wiki-powered communities. By the looks of it today, the name of his search is Wikia Search, though we could be wrong and this could change.
All Quiet on the Inbox Front?
Sometime in February or March 2007, I was going to publish a cynical post wondering if all of the members on the mailist list had been kidnapped, because I went one whole day without getting an email. At its peak, subscribers would get bombarded with 20-30 emails per day with everyone chiming in on everything you can imagine. It would start off with someone introducing themselves, why they wanted to collaborate and what they saw as a problem with the current search landscape. It was information overload but a great social experiment. Things have settled down now, but you still get the odd flurry of emails, usually when there is something in the news that touches on the project.
Enter a New Incumbent
In all honestly, this mailing list information overload phenomenon led me to realize why Google was successful: there were only two guys early on. It was easy to get things done. Ultimately, I thought, Wikia Search’s biggest drawback was its greatest strength. The wisdom of the crowds theory was making it unlikely for anything to get done, at least on the surface.
Over the subsequent months, web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis - who had founded and ran Silicon Alley Reporter in the late 1990s and sold his second startup Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25M - encouraged Wales to embrace advertising on Wikipedia. That prompted me to publish “What would Wikipedia.org be worth as a for-profit,” which got a lot of people excited about the commercial upside of Wikipedia.org. Calacanis was one of them.
What If…
But, because Wikipedia.org had launched as a non-profit, it had to remain as such, and Wales to this say maintains, quite honorably and candidly, that launching Wikipedia.org as a non-profit was his best and / or worst decision ever. No doubt, Wikipedia.org would have maybe not become as big had it been a for-profit, but then seeing socially-edited content sites like Digg and YouTube explode run counter to that assertion… what if Wikipedia.org had been a for-profit all along?
With that thought in the back of Wales’ mind, he sought out to start a new company, one that was structured outside of Wikipedia.org, but built on a lot of the tangible and intangible tenets thereof, that would become his brass ring.
Man’s Hubris: Search
And in order not to try to re-invent the wheel - though technically he was doing that too, with Wikia - Wales decided to tackle search. I’ve long stated that search is the hubris of the Web entrepreneur.
Why, I thought, would someone with Wales’ mythical stature risk it all to lose to Google in search? And lose badly?
By way of disclosure: I should state that I too developed a search engine, called MetaMojo.com, but I did so out of a personal interest as a hobby, and because it was something that would not violate my employment and non-competition agreement. Today, I spend a good amount of my time and energy on search, but the bulk of it goes to video, a far more nascent field when we’ve already developed a leadership position.
After all, search, while still a somewhat new sector of the overall communications and commercial economy is a more mature space. Oh, there’s also a massive player in the room called Google that has gone from $0 to a market cap of $160B in less than ten years, which last year generated $10B in revenues, over $3 billion in profits and could at current growth rates surpass Microsoft in market valuation by 2010, maybe at least.
Enter the Naysayers
Wales was not only ridiculed by many for attempting to create a Google-killer out of thin air, but he also has been criticized in the past six months for what comes across as inaction. As the mailing list at Wikia Search expands every day, people become impatient and Wales himself has frequently stated that “you can’t build a search engine like his overnight.”
To his credit, he recently hired Jabber founder Jeremie Miller to spearhead the project. I say this to emphasize: no doubt Wikia Search is making a lot of inroads and advancing, and there’s plenty of time left in search, but clearly, others are not standing still.
Thank You for nothing!
Of course, as excitement and innocence surrounding that mailing list gave way to cynicism and frustration, others have not sat still. Today’s New York Times article on search and the human touch should have technically talked mainly about Wales’ project, be it Wikpedia or Wikia Search. But instead, it does not, it touched on Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo. And not too long after someone in that same venerable mailing list sent the article around, another subscriber asked:
I am not sure if something similar like Mahalo (e.g.
http://www.mahalo.com/Java) was considered by Wikia.It seems to me that their way of providing search results is closely
related to the idea of a public Wiki.
I wonder what the reactions of both Calacanis and Wales were after that email was opened. Surely, Calacanis must have grinned when he clicked and opened that message, and Wales must have been somewhat miffed, for Calacanis is surely combining a lot of the elements of Wikipedia into his new project, Mahalo. I’m not saying that Calacanis borrowed from Wikipedia, though the use of wiki software, the human-compiled database etc., are all signature tactics of Wikipedia.org, though clearly by way of its open source status, not proprietary to it.
What Could Have Been?
It should also be stated, that had Wales long ago encouraged Wikipedia editors to add the most relevant and pertinent links for each topic, it would already have a human-compiled search engine directory consisting of millions upon millions of web sites. Of course the same things that plagued Yahoo! Directory, Looksmart, DMOZ and that will plague Mahalo would threaten it, but as it stands now, you can’t help but think that Calacanis pulled a Digg/Netscape 2 by borrowing heavily from Wales’ baby and applying to search at Mahalo.com. In no shape, form or fashion does this imply that they two are directly competing etc., but when I opened that email this morning (yes, I’m on the list) my reaction was: “Wales must not be smiling.”
Heavy Backers
While Wales was able to secure funding from the likes of Amazon.com and raised $3.5M for his search project, Mahalo raised a massive $16M on a valuation on $100M. That is an insane amount of money for a startup that many will ridicule as Looksmart or Squidoo, or even Chacha, all companies with many obstacles in the marketplace and no real strategy to be relevant.
In Search, Distribution is Everything
After all, the key consideration in search is not the quality of the algorithm, size of the index etc., but rather the distribution thereof.
While Wales had been openly talking about his new search engine since Christmas in a mailing list, Calacanis was coy. It was only recently that Valleywag eerily accurately described Calacanis’ project that the details came to light. Shortly thereafter, Calacanis unveiled Mahalo.com and the naysayers outnumbered the believers quite a bit.
I’m still not sure of how relevant Mahalo.com or Wikia Search will be, frankly. I do think however, that by having secured Sequoia as a backer, Calacanis has managed to ensure his company’s exit before Wales even hits the entrance.
Of course, if distribution is king in search, then Wales cannot be written off, since adding Wikia Search (whenever it launches) across the sprawling Wikipedia.org site would overnight create a winner out of his project, too.
The lesson, I suppose, is that online advertising is only starting to come to fruition so even the laggards in the space might have better prospects than the winners of many of the new segments of online commerce and communications that many are getting over-excited about.
Last week when I got back from the Economics of Social Media (recap here), I said I would be making a couple of announcements this week pertaining to our company, Mojo Supreme. The announcements had to do with WatchMojo.com, our Web TV unit which has grown into a leader in the production and syndication of web video for broadband platforms. I’ll be making those announcements later on this week. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it does validate what we’ve been saying all year since we launched January 23, 2006.
Anyway, this post is not really an announcement, and it does not involve WatchMojo.com, but rather, our search unit MetaMojo.com. As readers of this blog know, we have developed a video meta search since, but our first foray was a vertical search network.
Four months after announcing that he wanted to launch a Google-killer (here’s our head-to-head-to-head comparison of the search engines, by the way), Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales announced that Jabber Founder Jeremie Miller Joins Forces with Jimmy Wales to Build Open Search Platform.
“Jeremie is a brilliant thinker and a natural fit to help revolutionize the world of search,” Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement. “I believe Internet search is currently broken, and the way to fix it is to build a community whose mission is to develop a search platform that is open and totally transparent.”
Between then and now, Wales has gotten everything from criticism, ridicule and encouragement to develop something that can enhance the search landscape. Of course, taking on Google is akin to having a death wish. When I launched our search products, I had a full-time job, it was a hobby, a personal exercise in playing with an API, which then grew into more.
The focus is in our video content unit WatchMojo.com, but as that audience builds up, having a search within the network adds an interesting twist (much like having a matching community like StreetMojo.com). Since our audience is watching videos we produce, we decided to add a video metasearch. But since not everyone watches videos yet, we also have a vertical text-content based search tool that brings back contextual results from best of breed publishers.
In fact, with Google accounting for 50% market share, and Yahoo!, MSFT, InterActive Corp.’s Ask and Time Warner’s AOL locking up the top 5 search positions, search is both a risky and rewarding segment of online commerce and communications.
Search is the hubris of the Web space: MSFT might die because of it (well, not really, but you know what I mean), Yahoo!’s Terry Semel might be fired over it, and Jimmy Wales might lose his credibility and hurt his Midas-esque track record by venturing in it.
Anyway, over Christmas 2006, when Wales made his announcement, he indicated that he wanted to use the Nutch open source platform. Having built our own MetaMojo.com domain specific vertical search engine using Nutch, and naturally respecting Wales for what he’s done, I reached out to him with a “good luck, by the way, we have already done a large component of what you wish to do… let me know if you want to collaborate.”
For the mojo and vision behind MetaMojo.com, click here. We focused on vertical search, then video meta search, this year we’ll be focusing on personalization and social search.
Anyway, Wales showed interest, then, and again this weekend when I followed up with him. He put me in touch with Jeremie, though asked that I not disclose it until the information was made public. I chatted with Jeremie yesterday and am glad that this is moving along, though I have no clue whether it will ever really take off. Why? Read on.
What is Wales trying to do?
According to a story on News.com:
The Wikia project aims to develop a search engine, crawlers and other indexing tools through a collaborative, open-source process.
Of course, Wikia’s CEO Gil Penchina is right when he says that “smaller search companies that don’t have the time or money to do everything required for a complete search service themselves” might be interested in what Wales’ Wikia is trying to do, but let’s not forget one fact: unlike Wikipedia.org, Wikia is a for-profit venture.
In fact, as the same News.com story points out, “the complete business plan has yet to be worked out, but profits and revenue may be derived from advertising or services,” according to Penchina.
“The intellectual property behind Wikia, however, will be freely licensed under standard open-source mechanisms.”
That sounds great in principle, in practice, it might be what hinders the project. After all, as I have explained in depth, we intend on growing MetaMojo.com within the Mojo Supreme network. Like I say, imagine if MySpace had an in-house search unit, what would the value of Intermix been then? Sure, there’s only one MySpace… but no one said we wanted to be MySpace either.
Having seen Google become the most powerful entity in new media and technology on the strength of search IP, Wikia’s main challenge is determining what is open and what is not. It’s easier said than done.
When the mailing list was made aware of Jeremie coming on board, he added: “one of the areas I’ll personally be coding and developing is around an open protocol and how it can play what I think is a very cool role in building a search technology community.
I spoke to him yesterday after Jimmy introduced me, I wish him luck and we’ll see how and if we collaborate as we each try to improve the search ecosystem.
But the fact remains, there are not that many open-source billionaires walking around, and there’s a reason for that. In search in particular where distribution is everything and technology is secondary, one needs to be very clear on what the business strategy is and will be.
For better or worse, Google had Yahoo! In other words, it’s not the technology. And before academics, other search companies etc. will want to partner in building out equity for Wales’ project, he will have to understand that Google envy will be his greatest challenge.
We told you, search is the ultimate manifestation of hubris online. Upon our initial chat, we seemed to be on the same wave length if that means a collaboration, time will tell.
Hey, it’s all about transparency and openness, right?
Since 1994, we have seen many companies come out of nowhere, off the radar, only to grow into positions of leadership and dominate their sphere. Some go on and galvanize that leadership positions, others falter and let someone else pass by.The following is HipMojo.com’s list of Internet Company of the Year, based on growth, market leadership, traction, strength of management, prospects and overall accomplishments.
All right, time for the envelopes, and the winners are:
1994: AOL.com
The year 1994 marked the appearance of ISPs across the web landscape. By August 1994, AOL merged with Redgate (a multimedia publishing company specializing in CD-ROMs), and a couple of months later, in November, AOL declared war on Microsoft, betting the farm on an online strategy. This marks the beginning of the rise of the Web versus the desktop theme. AOL begins to mail out millions of CDs trying to win over the masses. It works. AOL becomes the fastest growing ISP ever, surpassed only by Japanese wireless service provider iMode a decade later.
1995: Netscape
Netscape was created by Mosaic Communicatyions Corporation on April 4, 1994 by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. On October 13 1994, Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was launched, and renamed Netscape Navigator shortly thereafter. But it was on August 9, 1995 that Netscape went public, offering shares at $14 and closing at $75. In doing so, it ushered in the first wave of the World Wide Web’s golden era.
1996: Altavista
AltaVista remains a poster boy for the “what could have been” lot. It was launched on December 15, 1995 by its parent company DEC, but given its pedigree, it was used primarily as a showcase for DEC’s computing power. In 1996 however, it became Yahoo!’s exclusive search provider, and by 1998 was sold to Compaq, who then began the even-more-misguided plan to remake the search engine into a portal. By then, of course, Google was rising amongst pure-play search engines. In March 2004, Yahoo! bought Overture, who had previously bought Altavista; Overture itself is the runner-up for the “what could have been” prize.
1997: eBay
The “Candy dispenser story” is created by eBay’s PR manager, which changes its name from AuctionWeb to eBay. In 1997, the company captures the imagination of the masses, the next year the stock goes public, like many dot com entrepreneurs, founder Pierre Omidyar becomes a billionaire. Unlike most, thanks to eBay’s 80% profit margins, Omidyar remains a billionaire to this day.
1998: Yahoo!
Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 and incorporated a year later on March 2, 1995. It grew reasonably quickly from the onset, and on April 12, 1996, the company’s IPO raised $33.8M for growth opportunities. The subsequent year, in 1997, it acquired Four11 and its Rocketmail service, which became Yahoo! Mail. The rest, as they say, is history: in 1998 the stock rose from a split-adjusted $4 to $40, cementing its spot as the future leader of web media. In October 1998, it made its first acquisition, that of Yoyodyne, by 1999 it was acquiriing larger firms, first Geocities (1999), then eGroups (2000). Yahoo! could have also been named 2003’s Internet Company of the Year, in all fairness, since that’s when it started its resurgence.
1999: Amazon.com
In December 1999, when Time Warner (still separate from AOL) published its end-of-year issue of Time magazine, it put Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos on its cover for Man of the Year. While cracks had began to appear in the Web facade, the fact was that no one, and we mean no one, saw the storm that was brewing around the corner. Amazon.com was still a money-losing enterprise, but one that was widely believed to be making a run to acquire venerable retailer Walmart. Yes, you read that correctly. Today Walmart is worth 10 times more than Amazon.com. But within weeks of that cover issue, publisher of Time magazine Time Warner merged with AOL, ushering in the beginning of the end.
2000: Lycos
Launched in 1995 by Bob Davis, Lycos grew to become the most visited portal in the world by 1999. It was sold to Terra in May 2000, for $12.5B. By 2004, South Korea’s Daum Communications paid $95.4 million - less than 1% of Terra’s buyout price. What could have been was, came and went and Lycos today is an asterix of the Web’s go-go days… but Davis legacy remains somewhat unscathed as the architect of one of the premier brands of the Web’s first era of prosperity. Today Davis is a VC, Lycos is Korean.
2001: Napster
Napster was built in 1999, it spread like wildfire in 2000, but it peaked in 2001. Shortly thereafter, it was forced into submission by the RIAA and the record labels, but the genie was out of the bag, paving the way for decentralized P2P file sharing sites like Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh and Bearshare. Napster was at the time the fastest growing consumer application, ever.
2002: Google
The year 2002 could be seen as an innocuous one for Google and in many ways, we’ll admit that we could have picked Google in any year. But since other companies had their standout years in specific years, we picked Google for 2002 for a few, well, innocuous reasons. After all, by 2002, the Web had just suffered its devastating crash, and while many dot com dreams had gone up in flames, one company emerged largely unscathed and perfectly positioned to benefit from it: hiring cheap and smart labor and investing in the super powerful computer it is today. That year Google’s revenue grew 409% from 2001, but 2002 was also the last year Google’s revenues were below $1B per year, coming in at $439M. Somewhat more interestingly, that year marked the last year Google’s ending headcount stood below 1,000, finishing 2002 with 682 Googlers, by the end of 2003, Google employed 1,682 people, and today it employs over 10,000. That year also saw the shift of Google from a “simple” search application to the search and advertising powerhouse it is today: the next year, it scooped up companies that added to its lethal search algorithm: first Applied Semantics in April 2003, then Sprinks in October 2003, right before it began to plan for an IPO, in August, 2004.
2003: Cisco
The network is the computer, and no company has benefited more from that than Cisco Systems, the stock that outperformed all others, and won our Top 10 Web / High Tech Stocks of Past, Present and Future (link below). In some ways, Cisco should not make this list, but since we’re looking at Internet company of the year, then it’s unfair not to give Cisco some credit, especially since they are the ones selling the shovels and hats to the many entrepreneurs and investors looking to succeed on the Web. In 2003, long after the bubble burst, Cisco’s stock rose from $13 to $24, nearly doubling and effectively ushering the return of the Web.
2004: Skype
Skype’s history can be traced back to 2002 when Draper Investment Company invested in the company, which was founded by the entrepreneurs behind Kazaa, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The Skype domain names were only registered in April 2003, with the first beta version coming on the heels of that in August 2003. But by October 2005, eBay paid $4B for Skype. Oh, in between, Skype revolutionized communications and scaled to millions of concurrent users, after hitting 1M concurrent users in 2004, 2005 saw them hit 4M concurrent users.
2005: MySpace
MySpace was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. As one of the leading and more visible players of the social networking landscape, it silenced all the critics many times over: first when it overtook Friendster as the largest social networking site, then when News Corp. paid $580M for MySpace parent Intermix in July 2005 and then when it went on to triple in size after Rupert Murdoch took over the asset and created Fox Interactive Media around it. Today, MySpace is the largest web property when measured by pageviews, with its 100 millionth user profile having been created in August 2006. We dubbed MySpace the greatest Web acquisitions ever after Google paid News Corp. $900M in an ad deal for rights to power its search engine and run contextual search ads.
2006: YouTube
YouTube went from 0 to $1.65B in eighteen months. Founded by three former Paypal employees and funded by members of Paypal who relocated to the Sequoia venture capital group, YouTube meshed user generated content with tagging to create the fastest growing startup, ever. The company secured $11.5 million from Sequoia and cashed out when Google made an all-stock bid for the company in Q4 2006.
2007: Facebook
Facebook opened its site up to the non-college crowd in September 2006, by springtime, when they announced their developer program, Facebook was clearly the “it” company of the year, despite being the second social networking site behind MySpace.com. Facebook’s growth spiraled rapidly as the 25-34 demographic connected with old friends via the site. Throughout the year, the paper valuation of the company spiraled from $2-4B, up to $6B, then $10B, ultimately settling at $15B with a $240M investment for 1.6% stake from Microsoft. Additional investors were Li Ka-shing - East Asia’s richest person - and then the Samwer brothers (in 2008). The company faced some turbulence with privacy woes, its Beacon advertising program was practically a disaster… but by year’s end, Facebook was breathing down MySpace’s neck and partnered with the world’s most valuable technology company.
Who’s your pick for 2008? Vote in the comments.
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