The twist to the story is that the founder of Wikihow, Jack Herrick, actually sold eHow to Demand Media in 2006. Herrick chose the wiki method of collaborative editing over the bulk freelance model of eHow. "It's like eating a McDonald's burger vs. a wonderful, home cooked meal," he told ReadWriteWeb in 2009.

DuckDuckGo has been mentioned in the same breath lately as search challenger Blekko, which banished 20 alleged content farms from its search results this week. We questioned Blekko's decision to do that, on the grounds that one person's content farm might be another person's more easily-read, accessible content. One site on Blekko's list, shopping review site Buzzillions, contacted us to complain that it was put on that list unfairly. A brief visit to the site makes me wonder if Blekko's users, who called the site spam by clicking on a link on Blekko, ought not speak for everyone. I like Blekko, but at first glance I like Buzzillions too.

Some people don't like Wikihow and think it smells like a content farm! (It looks pretty good to me.) Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta says simply that his users voted Buzzillions into the Top 20 spammiest domains and they didn't vote that way for Wikihow. He just does what the users tell him on this, he says.

DuckDuck go's approach of pinning high-quality content, which is easily edited collaboratively, to the top of its page of search results - is more appealing to me than Blekko's strategy of banishment. Blekko's slashtag feature, the creation of topically limited collections of quality sources on a topic, is very useful but feels different.

What do you think of Wikihow, DuckDuck go and the prospect of a favored source like this?

One neat feature of the app is that it goes into full-screen mode when you tilt the phone horizontally. Whenever you feel like reading a random how-to article, you just have to shake the phone.

Get the Source Code

Another nice aspect about the application is that wikiHow released the source code of the application under the MIT License.

Verdict

Of course, in case you really find yourself in an emergency, it might already be too late to read that article about how to survive an alligator attack, but if it's a slightly lethargic alligator, you might at least have a chance to read up on the basics before you get to put your new-found knowledge into practice - even without a cellular connection.