Nice Mike. I love it already! Really fast and looks pretty too.

So they finally found a way to monetize wikipedia. The right side menu is filled with sponsored links. I think this is great addition to Wiki and hopefully brings them loads of $$$ so they can manage the big bandwidth costs.

Very nice.

Why build a search engine to search Wikipedia, when its already available?

For example, Resultr.com has been searching all of Wikipedia for a long time now. See this search for “techcrunch”:

http://www.resultr.com/results.....ch&t=6

That site is build by kids age 15 and 16.

I tired various search terms, I don’t any results from Wikipedia! Just Google Ads acting like results. So Resultr.com 0 and Wikiseek.com 10!

Euggh, Resultr hurts my eyes!

Dont you just hate it when site owners try and confuse the sh*t out of users to get people to click on the ads?

Rafiq, I don’t see that at all with WikiSeek. The ads are all placed on the right hand side. Given that they are donating the bulk of ad revenue to Wikipedia, they have no real incentive to trick users into clicking ads.

Hmm… nice idea but have you tried searching for “wiki”?

http://www.wikiseek.com/results.php?q=wiki

The tag cloud looks more like a cloud about various native religions. The results are far from good. The third result looks pretty spammy to me.

TYFYC Michael - I was referring to resultr, not wikiseek & ads disguised as SERPs.

Ah ok. What does TYFYC mean?

Thank You For Your Comment

Ok. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t insulting my ancestors or something.

Hm, the old search is enough, imho. Don’t see, why I have to get all the sites linked from wiki. It takes you much longer to find the information you were looking for.

TYFYC again Mike. I ran an Experiment for BarCamp Cape Town: How to get something into define: searches in Google. TYFYC is an acronym I thumbsucked, Thank You For Your Comment.

Read more about TYFYC here

Is it a requirement for all new search engines to use google’s color scheme for displaying search results?

I would think they’d want a little branding of their own.

Perhaps THIS project - when it;s completed - should also be added.

http://www.citizendium.org/

This might be good if it actually worked better than Wikipedia’s own site (our test here). And if it is so great, shouldn’t it be available directly at Wikipedia?

Any Wikipedia-specific search engine still needs to correct for typos like Google does (”Did you mean…”) for it to be truly useful. “TechCrunch” finds what you would expect but things like “TechCrnch” and “techcurnch” don’t even provide a clue. This isn’t a huge problem when the typo is obvious but what happens when you’re searching for a term that you’re not sure of the spelling? Then you’re hitting Google anyhow most likely.

I just testing the results on wikiseek and they look poor. I searched for “dialaphone”, it did find the dialaphone page on wikipedia but the other results it produced are poor. The title for the Dialaphone.co.uk homepage was changed about 2 weeks ago, so it doesn’t look like wikiseek is spidering sites as often google, which shows the correct title for the dialaphone homepage. Also for some strange reason wikiseek lists several pages from itv.com which do not include dialaphone on their pages, strange.

If i was Sequoia Capital i would asking for my $5 million back.

I would ask for money back too. I made a simple query http://www.wikiseek.com/results.php?q=quintura and Wikiseek did not return the entire information available. How old is the their Wikipedia index? they don’t have to crawl the site and simply download its archive.

With the advent of google coop, which lets anyone create a targetted search engine in no time flat, is’nt large funding into things like this a thing of the past ?

kosmix raised $7million, seems far from successful, and things like directhealthsearch (http://www.directhealthsearch.com) and do “basically” the same thing, but probably took weeks to do instead of years.

Anyone could create a google coop powered search site just for wikipedia and its friends, and the hardest part would be gathering the URLs to tell google to include in search scope.

Am I missing something ?

Unless you add something (like medstory does a little bit with there nice little bars), creating your own topic/category search site by yourself seems dumb these days.

James,
You are right, and there is just such a simple Wiki search engine based on Google at WikiStartpage.org along with just some simple links to the major Wikis.

http://www.wikistartpage.org

Wow its very nice … showing some face on to Google.

You want to see how bad this search engine is, type in “orlando pest control” and all it returns is pretty much spam from a guy that spammed a few dozen articles in the wikipedia with his business.

If I want piss-poor results, I’ll just go back to using infoseek.

I noticed that the site file22.com is skimming articles from different sources, including TechCrunch and this article:
file22.com/?p=114

Without too much investigation I would think that this person is using Digg.com as the source for skimming articles. This because I saw other articles that have had many votes on Digg (or been on the front page). And then the person tries to promote the copied articles using reddit it seems like:
http://reddit.com/user/alessliber/

I think things like this are bad for wiki, as it just gives spammers more incentive.

Instead of wikiseek, just do what everybody is already doing; type your search term + either “wiki” or “wikipedia” into Google. Why do you think that both wiki and wikipedia were in the top 10 Google searches for 2006?

http://www.google.com/intl/en/.....t2006.html

WikiSeek can be created in five minutes by using Google Custom Search Engine, Co-op. Of course, category refinements are also included. http://www.SearchTheWeb2.com is designed for long tail search.

Spam might also be a problem.

“Remember anybody can edit Wikipedia entries - including adding related links - so if Wikiseek becomes a good source of traffic for sites that show up in its search results, then spam will likely become an increasing problem.”

Here you go. That’ll be five million dollars, please.

Due to the recent discussions online about Wikipedia’s efforts to thwart spam, I have to question whether a wikipedia specific search engine will be useful. Yes, it may provide some very useful results. However, if Wikipedia starts limiting contributions and becomes too restrictive in its collection of data, then the search engine may become biased as well. [for an example of a possible debate about wikipedia content: http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6149264.html

here’s the link (the bracket was causing trouble) http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6149264.html

Odd that they put the Wikipedia results in a blue box above the other results. I scrolled right past them thinking they were ads.

OK, so there are some UI issues, but I did some searches on travel-related terms, for which Google is just hopelessly stuffed with spammy sites. This thing did very well indeed.

I’m not sure you could use Google custom search to duplicate this, because you would have to crawl the whole of Wikipedia first to construct the list of sites you wanted to allow.

Of course, if this ever took off it might worsen Wikipedia’s spam problem (by raising the incentive to get spammy links into Wikipedia). Maybe that’s why the future will necessarily consist of lots of search resources rather than one dominant one - too many for the spammers to keep up with.

Who in the world searches wikipedia for anything other than the most general of terms? I don’t need anything other than google to do that. Geesh.

I was reading this post while at the same time needing to check the new population of the EU (some more countries just joined) so I put the search term `european union population` into wikiseek and into wikipedia.

wikipedia took me straight to what I wanted. wikiseek gave a load of garbage.

I have no idea if this business idea has any merit but it seems to me that it simply does not work in any case. Users - do not waste your time.

Futef (www.futef.com) has been doing this for a while

Interesting, indexing the linked sites is a great idea.

I’ve been using http://www.wikiwax.com/ for a while to search Wikipedia, it uses an interesting auto complete feature that has all the terms in Wikipedia indexed (or most of them, I gather).

I used to use another site, WikiWax (http://www.wikiwax.com), to search Wikipedia. It has the search-while-you-type feature, but it neglects to search the body of the articles and instead searches only the titles. It’s still nice, though, and it’s been out for a while.

Wikiseek is now completely redundant now that there is google custom search engine.

The staff at wikiseek my be worried that they are also reduntant. Oh well $5 million down the drain! I can’t believe Michael bothered to talk about this pointless site.

Move alone now, nothing to see!

for just wikipedia content http://futef.com - returns more relevant results - try searching for boston or bush and look at the first results. Also the Related Categories down the side seem better than the annoying tag cloud.

For me, this seems like a feature Wikipedia should incorporate in their massive MediaWiki system. As a stand-alone product it will have a hard time to survive.

Thinking about Findory and not getting enough traction, I wonder where Wikiseek will be in a couple of months from now? Dead, eh, Acquired-Pool?

Once this catches on as a search engine, I can see huge corporations with massive PR budgets dedicating staff just to maintaining their profiles on Wikipedia.

Ok I get it the point of having a Wiki search engine that works well. But do you really see people going to WikiSeek.com instead of Wikipedia? No.

Until there are numerous high profile Wiki’s, whats the point for a general online user that only knows Wikipedia?

I guess this is useful for the Wikipedia crowd. I’m wondering how Wikiasari will differentiate itself from this product, though.

I got this great idea to build a google search engine with all the wikis on the wiki start page upthread, but then I googled it and found qwicka which searches several thousand different wikis.

I can’t believe this company got $5 million in VC funding from Sequoia. Most of the functionality can be found in Google by appending searches with “site:en.wikipedia.org”, the only thing missing is the pages linked to from Wikipedia.

I tried wikiseek and didn’t think the results were comprehensive. I’m not likely to use it.

I think wikiseek’s corporate name is appropriate - “Searchme, Inc.” on many levels.

As per futef.com referenced above by Derek. I completely agree with you. As it stands futef could be to wikiseek what google is to msn.

My main disapointment is that it is not multilingual. With 5 million there should have been a way to make it accessible to everybody.

can not support chinese, so I just use google to search in wikipedia.

I can’t believe all the nitpicking that’s going on. It’s not multilingual? It just launched, duh!!! It’s not comprehensive? It’s supposed to be selective. And this
“I can’t believe this company got $5 million in VC funding from Sequoia. Most of the functionality can be found in Google by appending searches with “site:en.wikipedia.org”, the only thing missing is the pages linked to from Wikipedia.” Searching through the pages linked to from Wikipedia IS what’s new about this engine.

It think Google list results faster. And still i think i will continue reading Wikipedia articles, and search the web by Google.

need another way to search the Wikipedia with Google, but without trowing in the rather complex syntax (site:ect….) ? Try http://www.wiki-search.eu, it use Google Co-op.

How does someone start PPC advertising with the wikiseek site?

Love Wiki technology. But i assume that google will’ll do this job better