Here’s a news.com post about the acquisition of the distributed online search engine Grub by Wikia.com:

‘Grub was acquired from LookSmart under the open-source project Wikia. The platform, now available for downloading and testing, is built on users donating their personal computer power. It’s meant to operate through open protocol and community collaborative added functions combined with the wiki.

Last year, Wales claimed that Internet search as we know it is broken. Grub is one of his attempts to gather open-source technologies to organize free content on the Web.’

Well actually I think that Google and Technorati have gotten better rather than worse–and even Live search can be usable.  The only thing really broken about search is that people still use Wikipedia and Yahoo and Ask.

I’d say you’re better off letting your computer help the University of California find aliens than trying to help Jimmy Wales beat Google.  Anyway the first is more likely to happen.