Wikia Search the Downfall of Wikipedia?

Wikia, the company behind the wildly popular Wikipedia is reportedly working on an editable search engine. Frankly, I suspect the impact to the world of search will be minimal, but could there be negative implications for Wikipedia?

Here's what I'm thinking. Wikipedia currently enjoys some incredible traffic in large part because it is delivered by Google. Google likes Wikipedia because it is a non-commercial source of trusted, user-generated content that many people around the web have endorsed via links. Those three factors are unlikely to change even with a new entrant in to the search engine market.

However, what would Google do if Wikia's new search engine had the possibility of costing them hundreds of millions or billions of dollars through lost ad revenue? One possible response is to diminish Wikipedia's value to the web by reducing the number of times it showed up in search results. This, I imagine, would be a relatively easy tweak for Google and one that could be explained away as a rebalancing of weighting factors. Also, if the change was done as part of another Google dance and implemented well ahead of the launch of Wikia's search engine, the change would cause some excitement among SEO's, but would otherwise go unnoticed. I'd even say that SEO's would cheer the change especially those upset over Wikipedia's use of nofollow and the frequent complaint that Wikipedia has stolen the short head of search.

Is such a move too "evil" for Google?

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