When Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced his plans to topple Google's search dominance late last year, the interactive world stopped to take notice. When his highly touted Google-killer, Wikia, arrived on the scene in January, the interactive world stopped only to laugh at the search engine's disappointing debut. But now Wikia has rolled out a bevy of new tools, and according to Wales, the search engine no longer "sucks."

"[Wikia] pretty much sucked," Wales told TechCrunch. "It has not been usable on a day to day basis."

Part of what has held Wikia back is the fact that it has only indexed 30 million websites. While that issue is slowly being addressed, the real reason Wales is keen on Wikia is the suite of community editing tools that are now live.

Wales demonstrated the tools in a brief video. Essentially the search engine combines fairly standard search results with a wiki twist. So, rather than taking what's given and letting a search engine like Google optimize its algorithm for the masses, Wikia aims to put more control in the hands of its users.

While community editing wars are almost a certainty, two items remains less clear. First, Wales, who launched the search engine as a for-profit venture, hasn't said much about how advertising will be integrated. Nor has there been any talk of how conflicts between competing brand websites are going to be resolved. For instance, would the search term "beer" yield results with Anheuser-Busch or Miller Brewing at the top of the heap? Or, would it take users to the Wikipedia entry for the frosty adult beverage, which is the current No. 1 entry on Google? The early answer seems to be that the community will decide -- right or wrong.

But a larger question also looms for Wikia. How many users does Wales, an outspoken critic of Google, expect to attract? Though Wikia is in its infancy, it's easy to see how the search engine would attract a tech savvy crowd eager to literally rewrite the book on search. To his credit, Wales has armed that crowd with some rather easy-to-use editing tools. But not everyone will want to spend time editing search results. That means that if Wikia is to have any mass appeal, those who edit search results will need to do so with a broad base of users in mind. But if that's Wales' target, the web will likely see a showdown between humans and machines for the future of search. Unfortunately, for Wales, Google has a big lead, and yesterday the search giant gave the world a brief glimpse into its process for bridging the gap between the algorithm and humans.