Type of site | search engine |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Owner | SearchMe |
Created by | SearchMe |
Registration | no |
Launched | January 17, 2007 |
Current status | Inactive |
Wikiseek was a search engine that indexed English Wikipedia pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles. [1] The search engine was funded by a Palo Alto based Internet startup SearchMe and was officially launched on January 17, 2007. [1] [2] Most of the funding came from Sequoia Capital. [3] It used Google ads on its search returns to generate profit. As of 2008 it is no longer active.
Wikiseek was granted permission by the Wikimedia Foundation to index the Wikipedia website. [2] Wikiseek has made financial contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation, [2] and the group-edited blog, TechCrunch reported that it was donating the "majority" of advertising revenue. [1]
Wikipedia pages were re-indexed whenever Wikipedia had a database clean-up; external links were re-indexed weekly. [2] Search results included tag clouds of Wikipedia categories that contained the search term. [1] The first three results of any search would always be Wikipedia articles, and the remainder were a mix of Wikipedia content and websites linked to from Wikipedia. [1] The service used user feedback to reduce the likelihood of spam. [3]
TechCrunch commented that the search engine may cause confusion with the Wikia search engine that had been announced the month previous to Wikiseek's launch. [1]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
StumbleUpon was a website, browser extension, toolbar, and mobile app with a "Stumble!" button that, when pushed, opened a semi-random website or video that matched the user's interests, similar to a random web search engine. Users were able to filter results by type of content and were able to discuss such webpages via virtual communities and to rate such webpages via like buttons. StumbleUpon was shut down in June 2018.
Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.
ChaCha was an American human-guided search engine that provided free, real-time answers to any question, through its website, or by using one of the company's mobile apps.
Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search engine technology and officially launched as a "public alpha" on January 7, 2008. The roll-out version of the search interface was widely criticized by reviewers in mainstream media.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".
Truveo is a search engine for Web video, based in San Francisco and operated by Oath Inc. It was founded in 2004 by Timothy Tuttle and Adam Beguelin. Truveo launched its first commercial video search service in September 2005. Truveo was acquired by AOL in January 2006. The name Truveo is a combination of the modern French verb trouver and the Latin term video.
Yahoo Search BOSS was a Yahoo! Developer Network initiative to provide an open search web services platform.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software which underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund these wiki projects.
Cuil was a search engine that organized web pages by content and displayed relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil said it had a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008. Cuil's servers were shut down on September 17, 2010, with later confirmations the service had ended.
Knol was a Google project that aimed to include user-written articles on a range of topics. The lower-case term knol, which Google defined as a "unit of knowledge", referred to an article in the project. Knol was often viewed as a rival to Wikipedia.
Techmeme is a technology news aggregator. The website has been described as "a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation".
LeapFish.com was a search aggregator that retrieved results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and also search engines of blogs, videos etc. It was a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc, launched on 3 November 2008.
Crunchbase is a company that provides information about businesses. Their content includes investment and funding information, individuals in leadership positions, and corporate news.
DuckDuckGo is an American software company focused on online privacy, whose flagship product is a search engine of the same name. Founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, its later products include browser extensions and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo is a privately held company with about 200 employees. The company's name is a reference to the children's game duck, duck, goose.
SearchMe was a visual search engine based in Mountain View, California. It organized search results as snapshots of web pages — an interface similar to that of the iPhone's and iTunes's album selection.
Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.
Topsy Labs was a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California. The company was a certified Twitter partner and maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in the hundreds of billions, dating back to Twitter's inception in 2006.
The relationship between Google and Wikipedia was collaborative in Wikipedia's early days, when Google helped reduce the pagerank of widespread, uneditable Wikipedia clones that were ostensibly ad farms. In 2007, Google introduced Knol, a direct competitor for community-driven encyclopedia creation, which was subsequently shut down in 2012. Google later supported Wikimedia with numerous grants, and came to rely on Wikipedia for addressing the problem of misinformation on YouTube, providing verifiable and well-sourced information to those seeking it. Google and Wikimedia Enterprise started a partnership in 2021.