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?
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