Paradigm Shifts - Wikia Search is not one of them.

The news is talking about Wikia Search, a new search engine from Wikipedia, to be launched next week. The search engine is supposed to be able to challenge Google because the order of its search results will be based on how users rank results (which, in fact, is a method Google has been obviously experimenting with).

To me, this is an obvious example of operating within the current paradigm. "Search", as we know it, is not the end all and be all of what you want to do on the web! And in fact, it works perfectly well now with Google.

There are bigger problems out there. Try searching for "cool" or "interesting" on Google. You get some pretty un-cool, un-interesting results. It's funny, because a huge percentage of the time people spend online is spent looking for cool or interesting stuff. Search engines just aren't good at one of the major things we want to do online.

Now try searching for "cool" or "interesting" on Linkspank. I think we're on to something. :-)