You may not have heard of Grub, but the Web crawler company was just acquired by Wikia.  And now Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and co-founder of Wikia, thinks he may “change the balance of power from the search companies back to the publishers.”

Wikipedia Gets Grub
Wales isn’t throwing around the term “Google killer” or anything like that, however.  According to Eric Auchard, he stipulated that the change would take place “[i]f we can get good quality search results,” and went on to add, “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.”

So what is it about Grub that spurred this statement?  As described by Neon Kelly, distributed computing is the key.  “Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer’s processing power while the machine is left idle.  If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.”

Other details concerning Wikia’s acquisition of Grub remain unknown; there’s no telling what the purchase price was, in other words.  But Wikia has “released [Grub] under an open source license for the first time in four years,” according to a press release, so there shouldn’t be any secrets in that respect.

As for the balance of power – if anybody can challenge Google and its $160 billion market cap, Jimmy Wales has to be one of the leading candidates.