Wikiseek was a search engine that indexed English Wikipedia pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles.[1] The search engine was funded by a Palo Alto based Internet startup SearchMe and was officially launched on January 17, 2007.[1][2] Most of the funding came from Sequoia Capital.[3] It used Google ads on its search returns to generate profit. As of 2008 it is no longer active.
Type of site | search engine |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | SearchMe |
| Created by | SearchMe |
| Registration | no |
| Launched | January 17, 2007 |
| Current status | Inactive |
Wikiseek was granted permission by the Wikimedia Foundation to index the Wikipedia website.[2] Wikiseek has made financial contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation,[2] and the group-edited blog, TechCrunch reported that it was donating the "majority" of advertising revenue.[1]
Wikipedia pages were re-indexed whenever Wikipedia had a database clean-up; external links were re-indexed weekly.[2] Search results included tag clouds of Wikipedia categories that contained the search term.[1] The first three results of any search would always be Wikipedia articles, and the remainder were a mix of Wikipedia content and websites linked to from Wikipedia.[1] The service used user feedback to reduce the likelihood of spam.[3]
TechCrunch commented that the search engine may cause confusion with the Wikia search engine that had been announced the month previous to Wikiseek's launch.[1]
References
edit- ^ a b c d e f "Wikipedia Search Engine WikiSeek Launches". TechCrunch. 16 January 2007. Retrieved 2008-08-21.
- ^ a b c d "Wikiseek: Leveraging Wikipedia For Web Search, Poorly". Search Engine Land. Archived from the original on 2008-05-16. Retrieved 2008-05-04.
- ^ a b "Wikipedia Gets Plug-In Search Engine". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2008-08-21.
External links
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