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 search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view).

The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.
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?

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 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.

written by Florin C.