Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

We talked last month about Jimmy Wales plans to build a Wiki search engine to challenge Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) and others. Recently he added that his goal is to take as high as five percent of the Internet search market.

One major difference between Wikipedia and the new "Wikia" content will be that the latter will be focused on more targeted niche markets, while Wikipedia is a more general resourece.

In the past article I mentioned "His beginning strategy will be to start with a couple of open source and Java Search engines that are based upon the Apache Jakarta Project called Lucene and Nutch. Programmers would be able to adjust, copy and exchange the code among one another while others give feedback, according to Wales."

Wikia does offer free tools to the users but in exchange for sites that are with its resources linking back to Wikia.com., which is working through an advertising model.

Wales also took at dig at the Google saying that "The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now." I agree with him there.

The reason you hear a lot about the edge Google has is because they promote as an intimidation factor to try to discourage a lot of potential marketers from even entering the field. This tactic can be used by a lot of existing businesses. The reason why is because it in reality works.

The thing to remember with that is you can't compete if you're not in the game. Part of many competitiors' strategies is to intimidate you into giving up before you ever start, or to try to get you to believe they're invincible if you're competing against them now.

You battle that by making sure you're serving a niche market. If you know your niche and have done your homework, any type of announcements and insinuations can be ignored as you concentrate on what you're trying to achieve. Don't get sidetracked.

That's what I like about what Wales is attempting to do. It doesn't matter if he's going against one of the most powerful Internet companies. You don't know how well you can do until you throw out what you've got. Wales isn't afraid to, and neither should we be.