

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' open source, human-powered Google killer died a quiet death Tuesday, making Wikia.com the latest object lesson in the futility of trying to unseat Google as the king of search engines.

Even though the site lasted barely a year, Wales should not feel badly about pulling the plug on his ambitious attempt to harness the power of the crowds to take down Google and force search algorithms to become more transparent.

In fact, Wikia even managed to force Google to adopt a Wikia-like feature in November that solicits user opinions on whether search results are relevant.

But, the reality is that no one can kill Google, and its search box is going to rule for many more years. It employs 20,000 of the world's most intelligent people and rakes in billions yearly. It has a squadron of other products from YouTube to Gmail that insinuate the company's technology deep into its users' lives. It runs the net's best data centers, something that any true competitor would need hundreds of millions to come close to matching.

While it may be little comfort, Wikia has well-esteemed neighbors in the search engine graveyard.

Amazon's attempt to build a successful search engine called A9 failed, and its former head Udi Manber is now a vice president at

Google. Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com all continue to struggle to maintain what's left of the search pie after Google grabs its 60-something percent. Technorati, the blog search engine, has been all but abandoned by web users.

Simply put, Google knows history. Google came marching from

Stanford armed with the PageRank algorithm to conquer the search engines of the late 1990s. And after it won, it made sure to become powerful enough that no young upstarts would do to it what it did to

Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot and Ask Jeeves.

Google, which the feds sometimes suspect has grown into a monopoly, says search is very competitive and that its users will head to Yahoo at the first sign of trouble. It also points to its experiments to show that the company remains innovative and has no lock on users.

In 2006, Idealab's Snap.com was hailed as a Google-killer, but it all but ditched its search engine in favor of pop-up-ad bubble technology.

Last year's hyped entrant Cuil may have figured out a smart way to build a deep index of the web without needing millions to build sprawling data centers, but it differs little from any other post-Google search engine — it haslittle to draw users from Google's comfortable embrace.



There's been plenty of attempts to make search smarter — figuring out what a user means is one route.

That's the point of 2009's hyped entrant Wolfram Alpha, which hasn't even launched yet but is said to know how to answer questions as if it were a sentient computer. Powerset managed to convince Microsoft that its grouping technology was worth

$100 million, even though its public search engine only let users explore Wikipedia.

Others try to make search deeper, by looking into the net's unplumbed databases — sometimes called the Dark Web. Try DeepDyve. Some are trying to tap into the instant zeitgeist — by searching Twitter microblog posts, but Google will surely take over this category as thoroughly as it did blog search.

And still others try to make search results look different. The latest visualizer — SearchMe — mimics iTunes' Cover Flow, while older attempts such as Kartoo and Ujiko bravely tried more futuristic layouts.

Perhaps the best approach these days is to disavow competition with Google entirely.

The best new entries on the web are Kosmix, ChaCha and DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo feels like a search engine for 5th graders doing their homework. That may sound mean, but it's a compliment.

ChaCha answers questions you ask by text message, and sends the answer and an ad or two back to your phone.

Kosmix's founders scream as loudly as they can that they are not a Google competitor — instead calling what they do exploration, rather than search.

The company's technology works by creating on-the-fly pages about a topic from sources such as Wikipedia, Flickr, AllRecipes, YouTube and yes, Google and Google News.

For general queries, Kosmix is a refreshing change from the straight list of search results we've all grown so accustomed to. And hopefully, its founders are feeling lucky.

Interested in alternative search engines? Here's a selection of new and old challengers.

DuckDuckGo, Wikia, Kosmix, OneRiot, ChaCha, DeepDyve, Powerset, Technorati, Yauba, Hakia, Ixquick, Clusty, Grokker, Kartoo, Ujiko

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