By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?
I find it very interesting that in every forum where I've read comments on this article (here, BoingBoing, and Guardian) most people's first assumption is that when Cory says 'public' he means 'government'. Government is never mentioned in the article and the main parallel he draws is Wikipedia, which seems to indicate that by 'public' he means open source.
I'm not sure how well an open source philosophy could be applied to search. Most successful open source projects that I can think of are things that you download and run your own copy of, whereas search has to be centralized, to some extent. And centralized means resources -- Google has a huge number of datacenters all over the world and stores many petabytes of data. How could an open source project do something like that?
It's an interesting problem to contemplate, but I think the solution would be very difficult.