Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Wikiseek launched..

Last week, SearchMe launched Wikiseek - a search engine for the exhaustive Wikipedia. Wikiseek works as a search engine to look for pages in Wikipedia. Any search string entered in Wikiseek, returns the wiki pages found (if any) for that string. In their own words,

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.


Note that, Wikipedia already provides an option to search in the Wikipedia page. However, the new Wikiseek has significant advantages over the former -
  • The search string in wikipedia returns not only the links for the wiki pages for that string, but also the world wide web links for the same. These links are probably from the 'External Links' segment which is present in all wiki pages. The layout of the results is pretty simple (goog way), and it clearly demarcates between the wiki results and the external results.
  • Further, the tags are provided, which signifies that the search string entered, can fall into any of the tag categories. You can choose among the tags and the wiki pages containing the string but falling under those categories will then be listed. This is definitely exhaustive. For instance, if I searched "Kate Moss" and was displayed with tags like 'Drug Rehabilitation', 'English Models', blah blah. The wiki page results changed to the corresponding category once I clicked on these tags, and pages under this category containing Kate Moss were then listed. Comprehensive indeed.



SearchMe is yet another Palo Alto based startup (funding from Sequoia Capital, does it ring any bells?) which is falls under the search engines creation category. They entered into an agreement with Wikipedia and its only with their permission did they come up with Wikiseek. Obviously, the business model for this is again the ad based clicks - the Google way.

Further, it also provides downloadable plug-ins for various browsers (notable IE 7), where the wikiseek search toolbar can be added to the browser toolbar. Cool, so atleast now I do have an alternative in Wikiseek, rather than entering wikipedia+Kate Moss in my Google toolbar.
:)

1 comment:

@purV said...

There is a striking difference between the wikipedia search engine and wikiseek - wikiseek is more exhaustive, and just doesn't take u to a wiki page, rather gives a provision to list all the wikipages categorized by the tags. See, its a search within the wikipedia and the external web, and not just taking to a particular wiki page. I'd say, it depends on ur objective, but yeah.. its definitely useful for me. :)

Kate Moss, k.. i'll soon find another one.. :)