I am eager to see who will replace Google as the dominant search engine. It bothers me that one company has this much control of the Internet. And now, even dating:

http://www.google.com/romance/

Recently I’ve been with SEO for www.wikinvest.com, and I’ve been shocked at just how much power and control Google has over a business’ ability to succeed.

I think the Google revolt has begun. I already see it happening in the Bay Area technology conspiracy theorists (1, 2. People are getting fed up with Google’s faux-evilness.

Some people say ask.com is a likely candidate, but I think it will be a non-commercial (open source?) initiative. I’d like to see and take a community driven approach.

dmoz.org tried, but has lost credit because of slow updates to their directory. I submitted a legitimate site nearly 6 months ago, but it’s still not there as of 12/03/2007.

We need a search engine that is powered by the community, and non profit, and doesn’t suck. The ranking algorithm will be open source. Businesses will be presented objectively, not based on who pays more. The community will work together to fight spam. Users will contribute content indexing bandwidth and processing power with a distributed computing platform that utilizes people’s PCs, ala seti@home.

Google is fine for now. It does a good job and most people are happy, and it’s not bad enough to start a revolt. But as they continue down the evil path of complete control and monopoly — *cough* Microsoft — users will revolt. People will start to bolt. And when geeks get pissed, they find away around the problem — witness warez, napster, deCSS, and bittorent.

Update 1/2/2008: Holy shit. Wikipedia did it, they created a community based search. I’m going to call it now. This is the next Google Search.

Wikipedia Founder Brings Search Project