WikiSeek Launches; It’s Terrible
California based SearchMe has launched their WikiSeek search engine today, with the ever popular beta tag. The search engine searches Wikipedia, and what Wikipedia referenced in its articles. So if your site isn't linked in any of Wikipedia's articles, then you're not going to be indexed by this search engine.
I honestly see no advantage of using this search engine. My first hands on experience with it went pretty bad. I first queried the word "Google" hoping to turn up a Wikipedia entry on Google. However to my surprise I came up with a completely irrelevant result. SpreadGoogleTalk.com was in fact the first result. The 13th result was a Google page that gave some history of the company. That is what should have been first in my opinion. I then tried something more specific; "Digital Camera". This actually brought me to a website trying to sell digital cameras. Again this is an irrelevant result.
For now I'll be sticking with Google. If I want to bring up wiki page, I can just search for "Digital Camera Wiki", and it will promptly direct me to the correct page. Hopefully the official Wikipedia search engine called Wikia will be a lot better.
Along with being terrible at producing search results, it's also desperate for attention. It not only has a "Digg this" button on its front page, but it sent out this email to beta testers:
Dear Wikiseek Beta Tester:
Thank you for beta testing Wikiseek! We are happy to announce that the
Wikiseek open beta is now live! Wikiseek is a better way to search
Wikipedia, and Wikiseek donates a majority of its revenue to the Wikimedia
Foundation. Wikiseek also includes a Wikipedia Extension for Firefox that
adds Wikiseek to Wikipedia seamlessly, ~with no advertising.~There's a great Techcrunch article about Wikiseek up on digg.com. We'd dig
it if you'd head on over and give us a "digg" of your own:http://digg.com/tech_news/Wikipedia_Search_Engine_WikiSeek_Launches
Make sure you remember to click "digg it" next to our article!
Once you've done that, you can visit Wikiseek here:
http://www.wikiseek.com
News Source: TechCrunch
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