Search Engine X Too Powerful. Just Open Source It?

Ahem, can anyone else see a problem with this? A teeny tiny crack in the logic? Something we might refer to as black hats? The ODP (Skrenta's co-creation) was one attempt to open-source search and navigation. So-called social search and collaborative filtering are another, but like anything else with open-source roots, (a) it can be made proprietary and thus doesn't necessarily get around the power problem; (b) it doesn't allow it to compete any better with the current leader unless everyone decides to use it, and unless a powerful enough coalition agrees that one set of open-source standards are *the* set of open-source standards worth adhering to. That a large manufacturer got an unfair advantage in, say, toilet paper or razor blades, wouldn't mean we'd be raring to embrace "open source personal hygiene." That said, coming at the end of 2006, the announcement that the Wikipedia founder would Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.