Wednesday, January 17, 2007
SearchMe Launches Wikiseek For Wikipedia
Search engine company, SearchMe has launched a new service to search open source web encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wikiseek is designed to index and search the contents of Wikipedia and links to webpages referenced within Wikipedia. WikiSeek also features additional tools such as a search plugin for FireFox, IE7 and Opera, and Firefox extension, that alters actual Wikipedia pages to add a 'Wikiseek search button'.
According to the Wikiseek website, "The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. Wikiseek utilizes SearchMe's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines."
It says that as Wikipedia grows and more links are added, the service will continue to increase in value over time as a resource for researchers, students and anyone who frequently uses Wikipedia.
The site, built with Wikipedia's assistance and permission, won't show every relevant result to a query, but aims to give a good overview of a subject. The search results on Wikiseek also include a 'tag cloud' containing Wikipedia categories containing the search term. The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content, shaded blue while the remaining results are below the shaded area.
The Wikiseek community on Wiki says, "This Wikiseek Community is hosted by Wikia but Wikiseek is an independent project with no affiliation with Wikia or Wikipedia. It also mentions that Wikiseek donates a majority of revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation."
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