From The Register: "Wikia, the latest effort from Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales, has bought the distributed search software Grub from LookSmart for an undisclosed sum and open sourced it.

Wales, speaking here at OSCON, announced the move during a morning speech. He pitched Grub as being analogous to Seti@home in that users run the client software in the background on their PCs. Grub then indexes URLs and sends the information back to centralized servers. The software had languished under the stewardship of Looksmart, and Wales now hopes to make it a core piece of Wikia." 

"Together, we can all kick Google's ass" - Jimmy Wales   GRUB

My comments: Wales' theory is good. A process to create a better search engine following somewhat what worked for Wikipedia. The fact that Google is built upon a secret formula should worry its investors. Someone might develop a better secret formula or a hybrid as Wales is proposing.

What might we look forward to regarding search engines? Perhaps everyone involved with outsmarting Google, and everyone at Google trying to prevent that, will have to get real jobs?

This sounds a bit like increased efficiency from Wales. Increased efficiency ties in nicely with his background involving Hayek, and Rand. A market drives out inefficiencies if allowed to operate. Someone relying on a secret formula, somehow seems inefficient to me, and "competition never sleeps", as Neil Young sang.* It's true I have wondered about the inefficiencies of Wikipedia? So I'll write now that both Wikipedia and this new search engine need to be efficient to last.

*Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young