Despite Microsoft's and Yahoo's best attempts, Google continues to remain the dominant search engine around the world. Even with their millions of dollars poured into search technologies, people are just preferring Google. Then we have a much smaller player, Wikia. Their intentions have been stated, and they seek to create a search engine that can surpass Google. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia is looking to take on the champ, using Wikia as his weapon. Recently, Wikia has acquired some new talent, talent already known for skills in communication. The founder of Jabber, Jeremie Miller, will be joining forces with Wikia. He brings a host of experience, many of which could benefit the upcoming search engine:
He is not only recognized as the inventor of Jabber, but also of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), which allows instant messaging platforms to interoperate, and users to communicate freely and safely.
It seems he has quite the social engineering project already set out for him, too, in developing a method for a thousand volunteer developers to contribute to the Wikia project. Could distributed programming really create a search engine more useful and powerful than Google? Group collaboration made Wikipedia king of its domain, perhaps the same will be true for others.