Today while waiting at the airport, I took a look at the news stand, and right there on the cover of Fast Company were two words Google, and Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia is a poster boy of MySQL it was an immediate purchase just to see what was being said.

So the title of the cover was Google’s worse nightmare – Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has his sights set on the search business.

Now, often I use Wikipedia to search for things directly rather then using Google. I’ve found it usually to be more accurate, particular on topics I know it will contain. References to search users being disappointed, Google and Yahoo tied with a 2.3 of 5 in user satisfaction hits about home for me as week, and that’s exactly the ideas behind www.wikia.com.

The article states “Google doesn’t have an effective method of locking in its customers the way earlier info-tech leaders did”. Well I’d agree in relation to searching, but Google is rapidly releasing new products, new features and acquiring good ideas. It has the wealth (money and gene pool) to make an impact.

Some more on www.wikia.com — Wikia offers free MediaWiki hosting for your community to build a free content wiki-based website. Find out why you should use Wikia and request a new wiki in any language or see our list of wikis to visit an existing one.

Today, it has 69 categories, I’m sure tomorrow it will be more. today’s feature page is The Marvel Database, others like Wookieepedia – The Star Wars encyclopedia and 100’s of entries alone in the Games Category make it something to look at one of day’s when I have free time.

And best of all it runs the LAMP Stack. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.