Ever since the Times of London first reported Jimmy Wales intention to start a search engine, the blogosphere has been ablaze with speculation and misinformation about the concept (which is much earlier stage than first reported).
While considerable questions remain, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land did a good job getting some clarification from Jimmy and then giving his opinions as only Danny can.
I think the thing that everyone overlooks here is that Mr. Wales says in response to Danny about ads, “There are no immediate plan to sell ads, so for now we’re not too focused on that. If we don’t build something useful, selling ads on it is sort of a moot point.”
In my opinion, what the search industry should be most worried about is if Mr. Wales built a “good” search engine which was not at all focused on monetization. Now that could be actually quite disruptive if searchers were to migrate to it under some purest movement of some sort. I think the odds of that are considerably more significant than a great search engine killer emerging here.