Neither of those (especially Wikia) will topple Google. From someone who is constantly watching that industry (my hobby makes me a part of it), Wikia's search idea is far too weak to get off the ground and support everything. The concept is basically to have a set number of psuedo-experts rank pages a la Page Rank on Google (the ranking system is what makes Google so good). I'd love you to show me a group of people, no matter how large, catalog and rank the internet as fast as the computers at Google.

Google isn't perfect but, they aren't feeling threatened yet.

The only company mentioned in the article that seems like it could really grab a slice of the market is Powerset, if it really can deliver search results based on understanding plain language questions or sentences entered in. On the other hand, the original premise of Ask.com (when it was Ask Jeeves) was that you asked a question and it gave you the best sites to answer that question. Unfortunately it often had no idea what you were talking about, and basically gave you answers based on the keywords in your query, just as any other search engine.

Human-powered search is mentioned briefly in the article, and this is the area we at Bessed are concentrating on, although not as a head-to-head competitor with Google, but as a complementary search site to the major engines, offering a human-vetted alternative to the robot-created rankings found elsewhere. Just as Wikipedia tapped into people's desires for good information from humans, we believe that in time Bessed will accomplish this same goal in the area of search.

Google is much more than just a good implementation of a search algorithm that 2 students invented. Google has perfected the ultimate "scalable internet application deployment framework" onto which they can deploy any web application in a massive scale. They can challenge even ebay or amazon when they run out of revenue streams by deploying auction and shopping websites.

When Page & Brin were getting Google off the ground, they were not the first to market, but at that time, there was no strong incumbent to unseat in the search space. Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Altavista all had poor offerings. Google was a paradigm shift forward in search result speed and accuracy.

A couple of years have passed and now Google is a strong incumbent, with excellent products, deep pockets and lots of talented staff. The reality is that to unseat Google, you need a technology that is head-and-shoulders above Google's or a completely different user-interface for search...perhaps, something we've never seen before.

Marginal improvements in search accuracy will be insufficient to motivate millions of users to switch from Google. Remember, its not just search...it's Gmail, Maps, Earth, Froogle, etc. My homepage is a Google homepage because even if I found a better search engine, I'd still find myself coming back to Google frequently enough that the hassle of switching would be more of a nuisance than it was worth. I doubt I'm alone in this regard.

What Google should really watch out for is if an established player like Yahoo or Microsoft buy an up-start with a killer search technology and roll it out en-masse to the general public. That's the real risk for them. Otherwise, it will take several years for another great search engine to grab sufficient market share... during which time Google can prepare their competitive response...or did you expect them to just sit around and do nothing?

Nobody can match Google's power, simply nobody! Powered by Google is where it's at. Of course there is Hakia or Powerset, but Google does the same thing. If you're looking for a synonym on Google you can find one with the ~ operator, but not many people know this. Google has a whole list of advanced operators and operators that get the search right. My bet is on Google, because Google can do anything these other searches claim to do, and it's simply Google.

It will be interesting to see if and how this 'new kid on the block' treats PPC. It would be interesting to see someone come up with some more efficient ways of PPC that will help regain some lost credibility in the industry.
Unseating the big gorillas will be tough but, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.....