Interesting post over at the Social Software weblog, which raises the passing thought that the Web could eventually be dominated by Wikipedia rather than Google. Sunir Shah reckons Wikipedia is already the top ranked site on the Web, and argues that
because Wikipedia is the Internet's encyclopedia, many of the articles have included resources from the Google searches on that topic. 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.
The "unspammed" bit is important, because Google is already useless for many product-oriented searches, where the results are dominated either by so-called shopping engines or supplemental results. (You search for product X, and most of Google's hits come from sites that basically say 'We searched our site for product X and found nothing useful.")
The reference to "mere link directories" implies that Wikipedia's articles can also make it a superior directory to Yahoo.
