The following weeks will be a good week in tech, where Google battles with Wikimedia.
Here are my insights of both projects/sites.

Wikia Search
1) It will have more spam than Google, open is good but its not good all the time, if Wikia Search ate a lot of the market share, seo will be spammers and since the algorithm is open its a lot easier for them to be on the top of a search results. And in case their site is blocked, then they can create a dummy site that will point to the real site, hackers and spammers will eventually create a new form that can beat this openness.
Linux is open but there are no virus and spams, actually there are a lot its just there are fixed faster, what makes the different between Linux and Wikia Search is that Google is free where as Mac and Windows are not.
2) Privacy would be an issue, everyone can contribute meaning you can contribute pages that might have privacy issues. I just hope they can handle the privacy issues.
3) Semantic Web, its the future of the web, is it? If we follow w3c then it will be in ther near future but if we follow WHATWG and Html5 then it will be too early to experiment on semantic web.
4) Fundings, wikipedia needs you to donate to make money, web crawling is more expensive, where is their business model for this things anyway?
5) Hakia, Mahalo, ChaCha, Accoona, Sproose, Squidoo and a lot more, there are better in one way or the other especially Hakia and Accoona, i just hope Wikia Search is better than them.

Google Knol
1) Rebirth of Google Answer? The concept seems to be the same except that its target is Wikipedia instead of sites like Yahoo answer. Will this fail too?
2) From Google’s blog “Unlike Wikipedia, Knol wants article written by people who are an authority on a subject.” Now is this a good thing? How can Google know if a person is authorized on a certain subject and is it sometimes people who you think are not good on one subject turns out to be the best on that subject. For example some students are better than there professor.
3) From their blog. “Knol will be open to anyone and it will be interesting to see how Google verifies your identity. If you claim to be Nelson Mandela, how can Google know that this claim is real?” —– SCARYYYY

To sum it up, its good that there is someone other than Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask to battle google. And its just good that someone want to build a better Wikipedia.