mediajunk

A post on the Socialtext blog claims that Google's dominance as the web's number one jumping-off point may be threatened not by another search engine, but by a wiki -- Wikipedia, no less.

Over time, Wikipedia has been slowly eating the entire Web's knowledge base until it becomes itself a faster, better, and--most critically--unspammed reference matter of what are the relevant and valuable resources. And unlike mere link directories, it doesn't simply list links, it tells a story about them.

Incidentally, a lot of search-engine watchers have noted that Wikipedia is dominating the SERPs. One says:

Personally I love it when I enter a query and a wikipedia entry appears in the results - I know, or at least believe, I have at least one good result. Which is precisely the opposite to how I feel when an About result appears, and both are often there together. In fact I often append the word 'wikipedia' to the end of a search if the original results don't look too promising.

Is this the sound of rumbling in the undergrowth? Probably not, but I continually remind myself that the Internet is still growing, and its change often comes from an unanticipated source.