The emergence of wikipedia as one of the biggest, most influential sites online is one of the great stories of the Web 2.0. Sure, it has some problems – even founder Jimbo Wales (his online moniker) concedes pranksters can slip inaccurate edits into the site that go unnoticed for quite a while, which means you have to be a little careful referencing the site directly. But not only do the pros far out weigh the cons, it’s increasingly looking like the main site itself is just the warm-up act for an emerging wiki-based empire.

The rapidly evolving suite of wiki products was discussed recently by Jimmy Wales in an interview with David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at Fortune magazine. The first is Wikia, a for-profit company to host wiki style aggregations about information on anything. In the words of Wales, “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The Wikia people are building the rest of the library.” What differentiates it most is the depth of content they are expecting – such as 12,000 articles about the muppets on Wikia versus 300 on the Wikipedia site. Such a structure will almost surely create a series of self organizing communities that a variety of marketers will be very, very interested in communicating with.

But while this is a natural evolution, the evolving search engine Wales has in mind is more revolutionary. To quote him again, “Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and unlike most of the infrastructure, today it’s not transparent. We have no idea how things are ranked or why.” In other words, the open source wiki search engine has the dominant online players directly in their sights. If they succeed, the online landscape – at least in terms of the main power brokers – could change dramatically.

There will likely be some hiccups as the Wiki search engine tries to hit full functionality in about a year. But at a time when many people appear to have all but conceded online dominance to Google (with Microsoft as the ever present “dark horse”), the game might be changing very soon – stay tuned because it could be a wild ride.

On March 28 I discussed this challenge recently with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google at the Googleplex. The interview will be posted on UTube this week and I’ll advise you when.