The Mysterious Wikiwix: Affiliated With Wikipedia?
Michael Arrington
21 comments »
We got a tip today on a new search engine called Wikiwix. The site is new to me and there is very little information about it on the web (one post from about three hours ago is here). It is linked from the main Wikipedia search page, although I’m not sure when it was added.
Like Wikiseek, a search engine unaffiliated wtih Wikipedia, Wikiwix searches only Wikipedia. The “contact us” link points to this page on Wikipedia, which is in French. A translated version of that page is here.
The domain name is owned by Martin Pascal, a resident of France. The contact link above has information added as early as March 20, 2007. One of the questions on that page is “Who is behind Wikiwix, with which technology, which is the content of the bond with Wikipédia?”, which adds further confusion. Also, the fact that Wikiwix has been added to Wikipedia Search, something not offered to Wikiseek, suggests some sort of connection between the entities.
I’ll update this post with more information as it comes it. I’ve emailed Jimmy Wales and await his response.
Update: good additional information in the comments. Sounds like this is not affiliated with Wikipedia.
I have to say that I am very glad that for the first time, I know how many articles in my search results are “desynchronized”. Now if that ain’t customer friendly, I don’t know what is!
example:
1618309 articles, 0 desynchronized articles
i have an awesome wikipedia search engine, so mysterious it doesn’t even have a domain. Who could be connected ot this shadowy cabal?
site:en.wikipedia.org morgellons
I even get 70 results on MSN vs 8 on wikiwix.com.
The conspiracy reaches the highest levels, it works on Google, Yahoo, or MSN even. I will tell more when I know more.
Whoever is behind it needs to fix it.
Searching for “Idaho Falls” in their engine gets about 2 useful results then the rest are garbage, mostly for other cities.
Any other examples?
It looks like Martin Pascal is the owner of the French web development firm LinterWeb. Wikiwix is one of their projects. It doesn’t look like they have any direct affiliation with Wikipedia, however on the translated page Martin says he has been in contact regularly with the Wikipedia foundation.
Wikiwix is also not LinterWeb’s only Wikipedia related project. They have a partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation to distribute the English and French Wikipedia on DVD:
http://www.wikipediaondvd.com
hey thanks Stephen. Good stuff.
There is more on LinterWeb at their company site http://www.linterweb.fr if you’re interested, Michael. Though it’s in French of course.
Just to add to the new information, i have the linterweb.fr crudely translated into english!
I had a brief look and looks like they have their own search technology including “double indexing”. But they have done some work with big organisations like EDF Energy and IBM.
The site is simply crap. I’m from Germany and I have been looking for Techcrunch, too. The results are refering to the german Wikipedia - but there isn’t an article about Techcrunch yet.
who cares, wikis suck… structured data is much better.
What is structured data?
your translation is a little off.. the questions about wikiwix are posted by a user naming themselves “kerrigan”.. he says “a faq would be useful.. questions *I* would like to have answered are: [questions go here]”
hope that clears up the confusion a bit
This was their old link: http://www.wikipediasearch.net (it has a PR of 3.)
Other projects of the same company:
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page
The parent Company:
http://www.linterweb.fr
Translation: http://64.233.179.104/translat.....Frubrique1
Some posts about them: (translations)
http://translate.google.com/tr.....mp;ie=UTF8
http://translate.google.com/tr.....mp;ie=UTF8
Holy Cow! Are all comments being moderated now? (Or is it only mine?
)
Tony - it was stuck in moderation because of the links. Approved it.
If the results are from the German Wikipedia as Chris says in #9 then Wikiwix may be using dbpedia, which is a German project, as its source. This would mean that it’s not indexing the live site, but an old backup.
Bonjour,
Je vais répondre en français afin de ne pas alimenter une polémique je vais clarifier certains points.
Oui, nous sommes en partenariat avec la fondation wikimedia pour la création du CD ( http://www.wikipediaondvd.com )
Non, nous ne sommes pas en partenariat avec la fondation wikimedia pour le moteur de recherche ( http://www.wikiwix.com ).
Ce moteur de recherche a été conçu pour promouvoir la vente du CD de wikipedia 0.5, et que c’est pour cela que nous pensions pouvoir utiliser le nom de domaine wikipediasearch.net. Mais la fondation a finalement jugé que cela était hors du contrat ce qui explique donc la redirection.
Nous avons développé notre propre technologie afin de concevoir ce moteur de recherche.
Nous allons passé à une indexation en temps réel dans le courant de la semaine prochaine.
Comme nous sommes une petite société de 8 personnes , nous n’avons pas les moyens de faire une indexation totale de l’encyclopédie et que c’est pour cela que nous nous focalisons sur les articles.
Cordialement
Martin Pascal
yeah great. Thanks Martin. That clears everything up.