In case you didn't hear it first at times online, boing boing, tech dirt, or tech crunch, Wikia, Inc. is planning to launch a search engine, which is currently nameless, though I've seen it called Search Wikia and Wikiasari.

Confusion abounds regarding the precise mechanisms involved in this new search engine, but based on Jimmy Wales's comments to The Times, it sounds like the search engine's rankings will be based on user ratings:

…one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: 'this page is good, this page sucks.' Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way.

But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.

When trying to imagine how all this would work, we have to differentiate between the types of searches that people make. I can certainly see user ratings doing fabulous things for purely informational searches, but keeping things neutral—and even defining what neutrality means—for goods and services searches in which the searcher does not have a pre-formed idea of exactly which particular brand of product or service she's looking for will be quite a trick.

For instance, Jimmy (as a resident of my home area, Tampa Bay) gave the example of searching for "Tampa hotels." Yes, ideally, the first few results would be non-biased comparisons of various hotels or means of booking any hotel in Tampa. But what comes next? At some point you have to put the website for one hotel above another.

For searches like that, I can't imagine any way to keep up with the programmatic output of spammers faster than a regularly updated algorithm. On the other hand, if anyone has the manpower to do puzzle this out and the tenacity to repeatedly undo vandalism, it's absolutely the Wikipedians.