Wikiasearch to End Google-Yahoo Search Domination-Jimmy Wales

Google has been threatened to be taken over in searching, but by whom????

Search any prominent name, event, organization, etc on Google and the top search results yields are from Wikipedia.

Yes you've guessed it right. Google has been warned by Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales that Wikiasearch would takeover Google in the most widely used Internet search engine in near future.

Making an issue out of internet cartel like scenario because of only Two or Three Search engines he says that time has arrived for a creation of broader market for the users to get the maximum benefit.
Google and fellow titans Yahoo and Microsoft dominate the Internet search engine market which Wales said was already causing some worry among web users.

"Right now in the US in particular we have a really strong concentration of the industry," Wales said Thursday at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore.

Industry statistics showed over 90 percent of Internet searches in the United States are done through the three firms, he said.
Wales said Wikia Search will run on an open platform, similar to the principles behind Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia in which entries can be made and edited by anyone with an Internet connection.

AT&T looking at charging heavy Internet users extra

AT&T Inc., the country's largest Internet provider, is considering charging extra for customers who download large amounts of data.
"A form of usage-based pricing for those customers who have abnormally high usage patterns is inevitable," spokesman Michael Coe said this week.

The top 5 percent of AT&T's DSL customers use 46 percent of the total bandwidth, Coe said. Overall bandwidth use on the network is surging, doubling every year and a half.

AT&T doesn't have any specific plans or fees to announce yet, Coe said.

Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month. Time Warner Cable started a trial earlier this month in Beaumont, Texas, under which it will charge subscribers who go over their monthly bandwidth cap $1 per gigabyte.

Cable companies are at the forefront of usage-based pricing because neighbors share capacity on the local cable lines, and bandwidth hogs can slow down traffic for others. Phone companies have been less concerned about congestion because the phone lines they use to provide Internet service using DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line technology, aren't shared between neighbors, but AT&T is evidently concerned about congestion higher up in the network.

Those who mainly do Web surfing or e-mail use little data and have scant reason to pay attention to traffic caps. But those who download movies or TV, particularly in high definition, can hit the caps imposed by cable companies.

Download caps could put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video to a TV set for as little as $8.99 per month.

Ask.com Incorparates Personal Privacy Features

Web search site Ask.com is launching a feature that allows users to delete data on their search queries in an effort to bolster personal privacy while surfing the Internet.

A link titled AskEraser will be featured on the site's home page and all search results pages, with a clear choice to signal whether the feature should be "On" or "Off" during a user's search requests.
"We take significant steps to protect any data that's stored in our servers, but for those people who want to take extra precautions, AskEraser let them take the issue completely off the table," Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Lanzone said in an interview ahead of Tuesday's launch.
When activated, AskEraser deletes all subsequent search queries and related information linked to a user's "cookies," or identifying information from their computers. The feature becomes available on Tuesday for U.S. and UK users, and will expand to global sites in 2008.
Earlier this year, Ask said it had changed its data retention policy to separate a person's search history from their identifying Internet information after 18 months. The company is part of Internet conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp.
The opportunity to stake out private space on the Web becomes more critical as Internet use grows more deeply embedded into daily life and as Web sites and advertisers seek information on user behavior to send them targeted messages.
Ask is working on its own products that take better advantage of Web usage patterns, on an anonymous basis, to improve the relevance of the search results it can offer.
"Hand in hand with that is getting people the option of not participating" when they don't want to, Lanzone said.