California based SearchMe has rolled out their first product, WikiSeek. The search engine indexes only Wikipedia’s content and reference linked external articles on it.WikiSeek has a sleek, google like interface with sponsored links to the right. As you start typing, it will show the best possible categories to quickly filter your results.
The first three results are from Wikipedia (its shaded blue), rest of the result maybe from external sources (only links that are referenced in Wikipedia) or links to Wikipedia’s own pages. WikiSeek is built with Wikipedia’s cooperation. SearchMe has promised to donate a portion of WikiSeek’s ad revenue to WikiMedia foundation.
The whole idea of indexing external links which have been referenced in Wikipedia is to avoid spam and maintain relevancy, but I’m worried if spammers start targeting Wikipedia to gain inbound links (We all know that Wikipedia’s pages have good pagerank). Won’t that hurt Wikipedia?
WikiSeek surely won’t replace Google, but it serves as an alternative to Wikipedia’s internal search box. As of now, WikiSeek’s relevance is not so admirable. I tried to search for “Yahoo†and the first non-wikipedia result was Yahoo! Search blog: Yahoo! Search Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp) – Supporting wildcards in robots.txt. Hopefully, they’ll do something better in future.
News Source: TechCrunch
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