Via an article on TechCrunch, I learn that a new search engine front-end for Wikipedia, WikiSeek, has just launched. Major features are:
- Nice, Google/Live-style results page (rather than the crappy results page that the Wikipedia search produces)
- Results from Wikipedia itself and referenced Wikipedia sources only
- A tag cloud of results (though am I alone in finding tag clouds a bit gimmicky?)
- Sponsored links in the results page (via Google)
The company behind WikiSeek, SearchMe, plans to donate the majority of the revenue it gets from the sponsored results to the Wikimedia Foundation. I’d always wondered how Wikipedia could afford to keep running, though I’m guessing a lot of people (even possibly stingy old me) might put their hand in their pocket to support Wikipedia if it became clear that it was having trouble paying its bandwidth bills, so useful a resource it is.
If you want to add WikiSeek to the search box in your browser (IE7 or FF), they have a tool to do that too. Sweet.