Wikipedia Creator Jimmy Wales is taking on Google. His "Wikia" search is an attempt to harness the collaborative approach of Wikipedia for a Web search. Wikia will open up its algorithm (a la Wikipedia, open source, free software, etc.):

Wales said he also loves the court system because people can go in and watch the proceedings. He wants to deliver the same transparency to search. Contributors will publish, test, research, and modify the algorithms.

Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, notes the problems that could arise from this type of search:

There are two main challenges for community-driven search.

(1) Long tail. While there are many popular queries (See http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist_monthly.html ) there are also millions of queries per day that we've never seen before.

(2) Spam. The more you get away from an academic setting and into one where there is money to be made, the more you'll have spam, deception, people trying to game the system.

It seems that the best approach is an algorithmic system that uses community-driven data when it is available and deemed reliable, and does not use it when it is not.

(By the way, if you haven't read Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, it may be worth checking out. It's geared toward a business readership, but it has some interesting things to say about niche audiences on the Web.)

Norvig raises some interesting issues, and Wikia is definitely going to have to figure out some ways to deal with Spam and obscure searches. However, it's going to be interesting to see how effectively "the bazaar" (to use Eric Raymond's term) can develop its own algorithm. It may be that this is the type of project is not well-suited for the open source approach, but it's going to be interesting to see if/how it works.