Search could be boring if new challengers didn't sprout up to take a shot at gorillas Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

That's why I've read a few reports about Wikia Search with great interest and wonder if this couldn't be the search sector's version of the MySQL open-source database phenomenon.

Wikia Search, which is launching from beta Monday, Jan. 7, is an attempt to extend the collaborative approach nurtured in Wikipedia to mass search, according to Wikipedia and Wikia mastermind Jimmy Wales.

Wales, who made waves about the project in July by acquiring LookSmart's Grub search project and released it under an open-source license, told the Associated Press today he believes the collective approach "reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic."

What is the method to this seemingly mad attempt to topple the three vendors who corral 95 percent of the search market? Openness and transparency.

Wales and Wiki want to provide a search engine that lets users filter sites and rank search results, and lets them see how the search results were arrived at.

This is, at root, social search like Eurekster's Swicki, Mahalo, Cha-Cha Search, but with an open-source bent: Users can get window views into how the systems and algorithms operate, access to APIs, and so on.

This approach flips Google's search algorithm change practice, which frustrates bloggers in the long tail with its constant, closed and famously clandestine nature.

Google makes these changes for a couple of reasons: to boost results to make Google the best search engine possible (based on technology, not popularity) and to thwart people "gaming" its search system by spamming to raise their scores for PageRank, Google's tool for ranking a site's reputation.

Ideally, Wikia Search would use openness as the weapon to eliminate those mysteries Google shrouds so well.

This should be interesting because it may show us just how fed up people are by all of the closeted tweaks Google has implemented in the last few months, allegedly through DataSpaces and semantic, Web 3.0 technologies the company is said to be adding to make search smarter and more intuitive. 

What would happen if Wikia Search proves so attractive that users flocked to Wikia Search to give it a try? Will open-source search engines take some share from Google?

There is precedent for this in the database market. Some people laughed when MySQL came on the scene in 2001 in the multibillion-dollar market for database software. Slowly but surely that company has proven its viability as an open-source alternative in a market led by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Who is to say Wikia won't be the same thorn in the side for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft?

Could Wikia Search be the next MySQL? I don't know, but it will be fun to watch this take shape. It also may point to Google's introduction of its knol tool as an un-anonymous alternative to Wikipedia last month.

Perhaps Google and Wikia are in a duel to out-open one another?