Top 10 Ways to Search Wikipedia
Wikipedia, which turned 7 this year, is a source of information for 683 million visitors every year. A poster child for user-generated content, Wikipedia has grown from its first year in which just 12 articles were created to over 10 million today in 253 different languages. That's a whole lot of content, and naturally, being able to easily search it would be helpful for anyone wanting to get the most out of the web's favorite encyclopedia. You could use the site's official search engine, or you could search Google for "site:wikipedia.org" ... or you could use one of the 10 alternative methods below (in no particular order).
Powerset is a much-hyped semantic search engine that uses natural language processing to "understand" concepts in web content and match pages to queries. Right now it only searches Wikipedia (and Freebase). We put it through some early paces last week.
Wikiwix calls itself the "ultimate Wikipedia articles search engine." It searches all of the Wikipedia sites at once (i.e., Wikiquote, Wikiionary, Wikinews, etc.) and has a very handy Wikipedia image search.
AskMeNow is a mobile-targeted Wikipedia search engine that does some natural language processing similar to Powerset and then attempts to cull your answer directly from Wikipedia. Like any NLP search, it's not perfect, but often enough it is right on the nose.
Similpedia lets you find related content on Wikipedia. Paste a URL or a paragraph of text and it will dig up articles on Wikipedia that are in some way related.
Gollum is a Wikipedia browser that supposedly "[reduces] the complexity of information" and makes it easier to browse the online enclyclopedia. To be honest, though, we can't really see any benefit over just browsing Wikipedia in Firefox.
Qwika doesn't just search Wikipedia -- it searches wikis. 1,158 of them. Wikipedia is included in those it searches, however, and the site makes it easier to search across multiple languages.
WikiMindMap is one of the coolest Wikipedia search mashups out there. Enter a search term, and the site will generate a mindmap based on related Wikipedia entries allowing you to easily explore a topic and its related articles in full.
Wikiwax gives Wikipedia search the AJAX suggestion treatment. Get search suggestions while you type and find that Wikipedia article a fraction of a second faster.
Lexisum takes Wikipedia articles and summarizes them to a smaller, more digestible format that are better set up for printing. You can choose from a number of standard print sizes to display your article summary (A4, A6, etc.).
Ask.com and SearchMash (a test sandbox for Google) each augment their search results with information from Wikipedia. Not a pure Wikipedia search, but interesting stuff from a couple of major search players.
Bonus site: Wikirage
Wikirage is something like Google Trends for Wikipedia. The site shows trends on Wikipedia based on edits. Hot this week for example, the Sichuan earthquake and American Idol. We gave the site a full review last August.
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At the risk of doing some blatant self-promotion, the free version of our social media monitoring solution searches across wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, social networks, YouTube and more.
Whoa - that Wiki Mind Map tool is cool!
I'm sure that there are people need all of these resources. For myself Google seems to work fine.
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I prefer to search wikipedia using the wikipedia firefox plugin. It gives you the same result obtained by going to he wikipedia site and entering the search term into their imbedded search box. I can only understand the sense of going outside this method if you are looking to do some sort of meta search of multiple wiki sites. Otherwise, my experience has been that wikipedia's internal search function works just fine.
With Google's love for Wiki, I just use Google's search function. I type subject word, and then wiki. Example of I was searching for information about lions. "lion wiki". Google's first search result is Wiki's page on lions.
Or avoid that Top 10 list and just type the letters "wp" into YubNub! You are using YubNub as your browser's homepage, aren't you?
http://yubnub.org/kernel/man?args=wp
Powerset is also a tool to *read* Wikipedia. Check out the enhancements we made to Wikipedia articles.
I prefer to search wikipedia using the wikipedia firefox plugin. It gives you the same result obtained by going to he wikipedia site and entering the search term into their imbedded search box. I can only understand the sense of going outside this method if you are looking to do some sort of meta search of multiple wiki sites. Otherwise, my experience has been that wikipedia's internal search function works just fine.
thanks
I don't use Wikipedia all that often but I do see it as a valuable resource and your list has just made it all the more easy to get to that information. Thanks!
You may also want to try wikidashboard, a project by parc that adds and shows social dynamic behind wikipedia articles.
Posted by: metropol.myopenid.com
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May 21, 2008 10:44 PM
Hi,
You might wanna check Exalead Wikipedia search, ex search for [Apple] : http://www.exalead.com/wikipedia/results?q=apple&x=0&y=0
You get picture extraction, automated snippet summary, query disambiguation or expansion, entity extraction of people, organization, places and categories.
As for people search, our freshly released celebs search engine crawls people on the Wikipedia and builds relationships between them based on co-occurrences in sentences within Wikipedia, and aggregates several contexts throughout the Web : http://miiget.labs.exalead.com/
powerset is just a wikipedia search engine? i hope it can do better than this.
Try this as well http://www.52languages.com
52languages.com enables to search all language versions of Wikipedia with single search.