Seariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match for your search term, it takes you straight to it, rather than returning a list of potential results.
Seariki provides a very Google-esque interface, and returns lists of results just as you would expect. It also provides a directory approach using categories on the home page. It’s also possible toview cached previews of content by clicking the “scrape” button next to a result.
It’s a pretty useful addition to ways of finding information within Wikipedia. Interesting that there are Google ads down the side of the results – people are finding ways of monetising Wikipedia content even if Jimmy Wales refuses to.
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Are you suggesting that it is legal to monetise Wikipedia content? That is interesting then–because according to the AdAge Annual 2008, Wikipedia has more reader base than NYTimes. See: my blog post.
Cheers,
See-ming
Yes it is, as far as I am aware. You can do pretty much what you like with it as it is published under the GDL. The potential revenue for Wikipedia if it allowed ads on the site is gigantic (Jason Calacanis is constantly banging on about it) but Jimmy Wales wants to keep the site completely free of adverts.