What is Wikiseek?
Wikiseek is a Wikipedia search engine from SearchMe, created only to search within Wikipedia articles and sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It is advertising supported, unlike Wikipedia, and all the advertising revenue goes to the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation.How does Wikiseek work?
Wikiseek works pretty much like any other search engine. You type in a query, and results are returned to you; and since the index is pure Wikipedia goodness, hopefully the results are relevant and as free from spam as possible.I was able to use simple quotation marks for the query "can't buy me love", and in addition to my search results, I was given a tag cloud of categories that could further refine or broaden my search, i.e., American films, Frasier, teen comedy films, etc.
Clicking on any of these categories will carry over your original query; however, it's not foolproof and you'd be better off trying to just make your search as narrowly focused as possible from the get-go just to save yourself some unnecessary searching time.
Why should I use Wikiseek?
Honestly, I'm not that impressed by Wikiseek. Wikipedia enthusiasts know that Wikipedia's site search isn't that useful, and most of us use Google's site search (site:wikipedia.com "insert query here")to get around this hurdle. There's nothing particularly new or innovative at Wikiseek: no RSS feeds, no way to really tweak your searches to make them more powerful (other than the tag cloud, which ain't that great), and the biggest problem: Wikiseek's search technology is based on user tags and categorization; meaning, that if someone inadvertently tags the Brady Bunch as adult anime, your search results will be completely screwed up (until a trusty Wikipedia editor finds and fixes the error, that is).In addition, the Wikiseek results are not as targeted as they should be. Searching for something as simple as water didn't actually return any Wikipedia articles at all; instead, I got at least 10 sites that wanted to sell me water. The same search in Google? Wikipedia's water page was number one. This is NOT a "better way to search Wikipedia."
