It’s a little confusing around Wikipedia these days. You can search Wikipedia from within Wikipedia, or seek data from Wikipedia from WikiSeek. Eventually there will be another Wikipedia search from Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales and company, but everyone who thinks it will be called Wikiasari is mistaken because that’s a different project entirely and not the Search Wikia that Wales is developing.
Confused yet? It goes like this:
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia of information. It has an internal search capability.
Search Wikia is a new project still in the development stage. Wales has written that it fix everything that is broken with search.
That leaves WikiSeek, a search site focused solely on Wikipedia content. WikiSeek has been developed by a company called SearchMe, a startup based in Palo Alto, home of Hewlett Packard.
The best place to learn more about a startup would be TechCrunch, where blogger Michael Arrington has written more about the company behind WikiSeek:
WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.
The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.
Arrington noted WikiSeek is faster and better than what Wikipedia returns for results today. Also, SearchMe will give the Wikipedia Foundation the majority of the revenue they derive from WikiSeek, which serves as a public demonstration of SearchMe’s technology.
A quick search through WikiSeek to see what it could deliver on legendary blues harpist Little Walter. The tag cloud atop the results lets me choose from filtering options like blues musicians, American radio personalities, and Liberal Party of Canada MPs.
Clicking ‘blues musicians’ in the cloud sends away the results for Little Walter DeVenne (the DJ) and Walter Little (the Canadian MP), leaving links to Little Walter’s profile and other places that reference the great harp player, like his profile on The Bluesharp Page.
WikiSeek has a ‘live lookup’ feature in its search box on the search result pages. As you type, WikiSeek will try to guess what you want to find by changing the tag cloud below the search box if it can identify something relevant to what has been typed.
The site looks like a nice alternative to the native Wikipedia search. Unlike the Search Wikia project, WikiSeek is available today, and considering that it took a couple of years to be developed, it could be the Wikipedia search that matters until Wales has his effort ready for release.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
