Wikio, a Switzerland based company, was released in private Beta yesterday night (in French). It is one of the most ambitious web launches born in Europe this year. Pierre Chappaz originated this idea after the successful adventure of his vertical ecommerce comparison engine Kelkoo, that was sold to Yahoo. He’s going to try to make it again but this time with an interesting news search service after he realized there was no true satisfactory solutions on the market. Wikio is a smart combination of Digg+Technorati+Google news. It should extend to other European countries and USA very soon.
Wikio is a really ‘web2.0′ news search engine where you can find interesting features and technology and where the role played by the user is very important. Wikio runs search on a library of sources, indexed and qualified manually, that is composed of online media (newspapers, etc..) but also edge content sites (blogs). And here is the first difference with Google News. They are covering more than 10,000 reliable sources (for France but for other country quantity will be important also) when Google News is covering only 500. Each piece of information is defined with a category (economy / high-tech) and a series of tags.
Wikio is a user managed news search engine. It watches, real time, thousands of news sources, gathers hundreds of thousands of stories every day and classifies them by their topics in a multi millions documents database. information classification is based both on its relevancy and on its members popularity who vote, discuss or even write new stories
The search algorithm is a combination of ‘logical’ and semantical requests that will enable association with other relevant words. Only Accoona is able to run search like that to our knowledge. On the technological side Wikio has also developed a tool that will convert any web source in RSS format.
Indexing the sources and building the algorithm took about one year of development.
A social search engine
Here is where Wikio will outperform other players. They integrated all sorts of web2.0 features so the user will be able to improve the relevancy of the results. They integrated for each search results the already very popular rating /comment system you can find in Digg for example. But unlike Digg (which is mainly tech-oriented although you can virtually post anything) Wikio will cover all categories of information. The user will also have the possibility to edit a news in a given category/tag and each page results is equipped with a mini-wiki ready to be edited.
You can if you wish create your own profile and store your favorite search queries always available at hand. Pierre Chappaz mentioned they would also store your search history as well as clicked and rated news.
The user interface is quite clear and in a way familiar (digg structure / search ). You can easily re-order results according to date/ popularity/ and relevancy and change in a click font size. Each search query is coming with an RSS feed you can subscribe. And one of the most interesting aspects is the automatically generated tag cloud for each query that will help you extend your search intuitively. So if you run a search on TechCrunch it will lead you to web2.0 or blogs or podcasts……
Wikio will soon include podcast search and I would love to see a picture and video search feature to make it complete.
It will open to the public in the next few weeks and will quickly extend to most European countries and USA.
The company is managed by Pierre Chappaz and has ten other employees. It is self financed but will consider a first round by the end of the year. Business model will be based on integration of sponsored links and Wikio bets on viral marketing and the quality of its product to reach critical size (could we suggest integration of sharing features, forward to a friend or even APIs to build mashups and widgets for Typepad/Wordpress).
Challenge and Assets
Will Wikio manage to become a reflex as Kelkoo, Google or Technorati did? That is the question. Wikio certainly has strong assets in Europe where competition and localization is close to non-existing (Google news is very limited and they never managed to impose Froogle vs Kelkoo) but they will have to face serious and well funded US players like Technorati, NewsVine and recently acquired NewRoo. Social news is a crowded space and Wikio will be a new feature to bookmark but we can trust Pierre Chappaz expertise in building successful stories to make it happen.
Wikio is a very ambitious project and has a strong technology with a skilled team in vertical search. This is certainly the most interesting European initiative since Skype. To be continued.
You can subscribe to the beta version here. Wikio and Pierre Chappaz blogs (in French only).
It’s funny when new services are described in terms of existing ones. Ok, Wikio is Digg+Technorati+Google news but what does it do differently?
Is Wikio like Google news because it does automated clustering or because it aggregates and classifies a large number of sources?
How do users influence classification and relevance?
Sorry to be blunt, but this review offered no technical details to answer these questions.
isb, the article clearly states that they do aggregate and cluster news from 10 000 sources, and that users influence the ranking of stories similar to the way they do with Digg.
I think it could easily become a very important community, mainly because it doesn’t focus on tech related news. Digg isn’t limited to tech news either, but in practice it effectively is. I’ve been looking for a service similar to Digg but which caters to multiple news categories, and this could fit the bill quite nicely.
That looks pretty nice…I hardly can say that about the latest Web 2.0 products. I’ll be using that one for sure
There are lots of web2.0 search engines. I figure that simplicity is key. Having all this functionality lumped into one engine is great, but for the avreage user, is it overkill? Maybe… or maybe it is too soon.
Wikio is a very interesting project in its category. But I suspect that the average person may be overblown by the volume of information it’s exposing to the user.
It looks like a solution in search of a clear problem. I’m using a lot RSS feeds to get news from sources I chose. I include Digg and some blogs into my RSS aggregator to “discover” stuff that wouldn’t necessarily show up in my regular RSS news sources. Sometimes, I need to dig into a specific area of interest and in that case Wikio could be interesting. But not as a regularly visited site.
Wikio looks to me like a specific feature of a search engine like Google or MSN Search. Or even one that could be attached to an RSS aggregator.
Edit a news? Do you mean edit a news headline?
Remember Inform? Way too much, way too late.
These reviews of products still in beta is pointless. By the time they launch, noone will remember the website or want to check it out anymore. Mike, you’re blog would be far more popular if you only offered reviews of products that one can actually sign up and register with when reviewed.
#12 i meant news not news headline (see screenshot)
#14 you can sign up to the landing page (created at the request of Techcrunch for users like you
and we will post a note when the service is about to release.
Is there any way to know how visitors/users all these new companies are getting. Thanks, Nil
En tout cas la traduction de ce texte, dont la source devait etre en francais, est un grand moment de rigolade. Tout simplement digne de http://www.english.com
Imho, non-tech people dont care about ranking, i mean most of them dont even know what a tag is, they just want to read news.
See newsvine, i wouldnt call it a success so far.
http://www.shebude.cn
Interesting, but what about the Newstin.com?
Why do we need all this information.
New the more the better – New Junkie
htttp://www.india2.in
a little healthy competition for digg can only be a good thing.
- Phil
Nothing special