They’re testing a service where users can promote and demote search results, and leave comments — all right inside the google interface.

Here’s the techcrunch video:

You don’t have to be William Gibson to get a looking-at-the-future quiver. But this is very bad news for Wikia, the startup run by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. They’ve spent the last year or so trying to build exactly what google just rolled out.

Wikia search had a noble goal — to open-source bloody websearch, which is central to just about everything — but they never had a chance against Google; they would have had to hire every PhD, ever. (I’ve said before that Wikia should concentrate on building communities, which they’re great at, not building search engines.)

It’s also bad news for Yahoo. It looks like Google is buying Digg — which is social search in a very general way — and unlike yahoo, they’re willing to integrate their websites with each other.

Update: Google walked away from the digg deal! I think this might actually have been the right decision (and yahoo has to be breathing easier).

Posted Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:20:50 and filed under business. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.