Mike Arrington has the scoop on Wikiseek, “A better way to search Wikipedia”.

Mike reports that the site has just gone live, and intermittent problems I’m seeing with browser authentication challenges would suggest that some of their servers possibly haven’t noticed that they’re open for business yet.

The model is an interesting one, and it’s a great example of taking open data, adding value to it, and making a business for yourself whilst also feeding revenue back to the providers of the original data. As Mike reports,

“SearchMe is donating ‘the majority’ of revenue generated from advertising on WikiSeek to the Wikimedia Foundation. Adams told me earlier this evening that WikiSearch is a showcase product for their technology, and they are happy to help the Wikipedia community as much as possible by donating those revenues.”

Wikiseek has the essential browser search plugin, and whether you use that or visit the home page, you get a rapid search across Wikipedia content and across any page referred to from within Wikipedia. As the About page explains,

“The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme’s category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.”

I’ve only just started playing, but one thing that surprised me was the way in which they’ve decided to display results from your search; you get (and ignore) the usual ads down the right hand side. To the top is a useful tag cloud with which results can be refined, and to the bottom of the main area - in white - are the results from pages to which Wikipedia points. To the top of the main area are the results from Wikipedia itself, but oddly these are displayed on a light blue background exactly like a Google sponsored link. Surely the savvy net user is going to apply skills learned on Google, and simply tune out those results with the blue background, assuming that they’re just ads?

I remember - but only vaguely, so can’t cite anything - some research from inside the BBC about uses made of their internal search engine. For a time, they were promoting “BBC recommended” (ie editorially vetted, rather than advertising) results to this same area of the screen… and they were finding them almost universally ignored. Moving the results physically to a different area of the page (as I remember it), solved the problem. Might Wikiseek have to do something similar?

Technorati Tags: open data, Talis, TechCrunch, Wikipedia

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