Wikiseek was a

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

that indexed

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...

pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles. The search engine was funded by a

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

based Internet startup

SearchMe 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. In July 2009, the company lost fun ...

and was officially launched on January 17, 2007. Most of the funding came from

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

. It used

Google ads Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, and videos to web users. It can place ads in the res ...

on its search returns to generate profit. As of 2008 it is no longer active. Wikiseek was granted permission by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

to index the Wikipedia website. Wikiseek has made financial contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation, and the group-edited blog,

TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. I ...

reported that it was donating the "majority" of advertising revenue. Wikipedia pages were re-indexed whenever Wikipedia had a database clean-up; external links were re-indexed weekly. Search results included

tag cloud A tag cloud (also known as a word cloud or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation of text data which is often used to depict tag (metadata), keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually singl ...

s of Wikipedia categories that contained the search term. 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. The service used user feedback to reduce the likelihood of spam. TechCrunch commented that the search engine may cause confusion with the

Wikia Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities and Wikia) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e., video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). The Privately held company, privately held for-profit Delaware ...

that had been announced the month previous to Wikiseek's launch.

References

External links

TechCrunch Article
{{Web search engines navbox Domain-specific search engines Defunct internet search engines