When you're King of the Hill, everyone wants to topple you and take your place, that's just the danger of being the market leader.  For a few years now, companies keep popping up aiming to be a "Google Killer" and wrestle away the top dog spot, and sleep on huge piles of money.  Well, the latest guy aiming to take on The Big G is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.  In addition to founding Wikipedia, a user-editable encyclopedia that has exploded in popularity in the last few years, Wales founded and runs Wikia, a for-profit company centered around wiki technology.

Last week, Wikia announced that it had acquired web crawling technology from lookSmart Ltd, with the goal of creating a community-driven search engine to rival Yahoo, MSN, and of course Google.  The idea is that while automated algorithms may do a lot of the heavy lifting in sorting search results, nothing can beat a human at taking that final step to distinguish actual quality content from pages that are designed to trick the system.  Also, while most search engines hide how they rank results, Wikia plans to make the entire process (and source code) open for anyone to look at and tinker with.

Will Wikia topple Google?  Only time will tell.  The new search engine isn't scheduled for release until late 2007.