The Wikipedia Foundation, the guys who bring the world Wikipedia, has launched Wikiseek. Wikiseek aims to be the google of Wikipedia – it’s a search engine that focuses on returning relevant results within wikipedia itself.
I used it a couple of times today and I added my Digg. While the interface is nice and clean and it has some very nice Ajax capabilities such as live search refinements, it’s not yet compelling enough to warrant using it over Google. Google, in almost any generic search, returns Wikipedia entries usually on the front page – if the content is within Wikipedia. Plus, it gives me other places outside of Wikipedia at the same time.
OK, so I tried it out. I did a simple search on the term “ajax”. You can see the search results page for Ajax. While I realize Ajax is a fairly overloaded term, it actually shows “Football (soccer)” and “Sports seasons” as high tag relevance – or at least I assume given their customary tag size. Also, the first three colored results (which I’m still unclear how they differ from the remaining results) don’t match what I’m looking for. They match Ajax alright – but not Web2.0 Ajax programming. OK, clearly, in their algorithm, the other Ajax entries have the most relevance — even if they don’t match my expectation.
So let’s try google, using the same query. I tried the search twice – once logged in with my google account. Another, logged out. Now, granted, google probably has some context about me — I’m not sure. But, their results are entirely different and look nothing like Wikiseek.
Everything on the front page of google’s search results page fits what I’m looking for exactly. It’s all about Ajax: the Web2.0, Javascript Ajax that is. This is relevant search.
OK, Google is a very mature, multi-billion search engine that’s perfected their search over many years and trillions of queries. So, I’m not ready to throw the “baby out with the bath water” on wikiseek. There’s plenty of room to improve it – and that’s exactly what they want to do during their beta period. And that’s perfectly fine by me.
Wikiseek may have a place down the road as a vertical search engine – especially if they can totally replace their existing search interface in the Wikipedia site. Until then, I’ll continue to use Google.
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