Comments on: wikinifty

wikinifty

allkindsoftime — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:52:32 -0800

Wikiseek. A better way to search Wikipedia.

By: knave

knave — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:10:23 -0800

For me, the easiest way to search Wikipedia is adding "site:en.wikipedia.org" to a Google query.

By: elwoodwiles

elwoodwiles — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:15:42 -0800

Why not just use the wikipedia search option in Firefox? I just searched for "Qualia" from my firefox searchbar and was taken directly to the relevant wikipedia article. When I used wikiseek I was taken to a page with a link to the relevant article. Methinks firefox is still "the better way..."

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:16:26 -0800

It does more than that. It also returns sites that are linked to by Wikipedia which presumably are "trusted" sites.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:16:31 -0800

I add Wikipedia to the search string on Google and it invariably comes out on top.

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:20:34 -0800

I type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[Search Term] into my address bar so I am smarter than all you guys!

By: designbot

designbot — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:32:49 -0800

This is better than the big search box on the front page of Wikipedia how? If I type "apple" into Wikipedia's search box and hit "Go," I go directly to an article about apples, with links at the top of the page to articles about Apple, Inc. and Apple Records. If I type "apple" and hit "Search," I get 25,276 articles, sorted by relevance. If I type "apple" into Wikiseek, I get exactly 2 Wikipedia article results; the page about apples and a page about the Apple Records vs. Apple, Inc. lawsuit. I also get a kajillion random web results. (The #2 result is a giant single-image ad page for Herrljunga Swedish Cider; Apple, Inc.'s phone contact page is #5.) Oh, and of course, a long column of Google AdSense ads. Simply typing "Apple" into Google gives me Apple, Inc.'s website as the first result, and the corresponding Wikipedia article as #8.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:33:57 -0800

It also returns sites that are linked to by Wikipedia which presumably are "trusted" sites. Presumably. Since when did they stop teaching students that referencing websites was a bad idea? Since when did we assume anything Wikipedia links to is trustworthy?

By: blastrid

blastrid — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:34:25 -0800

wikiuseless

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:39:27 -0800

I use Qwika which has a few more options and a bit longer in the tooth.

By: mullingitover

mullingitover — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:42:59 -0800

This is how you do it. Firefox > about:config > keyword.URL > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search= This makes firefox do a wikipedia search with whatever non-url term you type in the address bar. It's my favorite firefox hack.

By: localhuman

localhuman — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:43:56 -0800

what makes this site great is all the adsense links.

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:47:36 -0800

Nice tip, mullingitover.

By: Terminal Verbosity

Terminal Verbosity — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:48:47 -0800

I use Slim Search and put virtually no effort into research. The sixth-grade me sitting in front of an Encyclopedia Britannica trying desperately not to plagiarize for his report on Henry Clay is sooo jealous.

By: localhuman

localhuman — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:51:28 -0800

Wikiseek: a critique -most wikiusers would prefer not to see adsense links when searching for information -most wikiusers don't care how many savvy web 2.0 users have 'dugg' the website -calling a site "example.com BETA", and by doing so inferring that some important bugs will be fixed and improvements will be soon implemented is lame.

By: cribcage

cribcage — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:52:44 -0800

Yeah, this is lame. I'll agree that Wikipedia's own search function sucks unless you know exactly what you're looking for; but like Knave, I just plug "site:wikipedia.org" (the "en." prefix isn't necessary) into Google. It works fine, and keeps my searching consolidated. I don't need 40 different search engines. On the other hand, it is kinda funny that they're basically mimicking one of Google's functions, trying to get people to use this instead of Google, and then trying to make it profitable using Google's AdSense.

By: Paragon

Paragon — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:55:55 -0800

I use a variant of Mullingitover's method; a right-click in a search bar in Firefox will give you the option "Add a keyword for this search". Now, if I want to search Wikipedia, I type "w [search term]" into the address bar. "g" does a Google search, "d" dictionary.com, "m" imdb.com, "b" a Google book search, etc. Really speeds things up.

By: grouse

grouse — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:56:00 -0800

(the "en." prefix isn't necessary) Unless you want to eliminate results in languages other than English.

By: cribcage

cribcage — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:01:45 -0800

That's its function; but in my experience, it isn't necessary. If your search terms are in English, then Google will return results from the English version of Wikipedia; and if you get any results from other versions, they'll be buried at the bottom.

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:10:05 -0800

Drag this link to your toolbar. It will either search the currently selected text, or if none is, show you a search a box. Also, the "Did You Mean?" answers.com does a much better job of finding appropriate articles than Wikipedia, or this Wikiseek adfarm.

By: MetaMonkey

MetaMonkey — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:55:24 -0800

A google/yahoo search on 'wiki [query]' gets you the english lang wikipedia page corresponding to your query in the top 5 results 98 out of 100 times, with pretty minimal typing (no need for all that 'pedia messing about or that pesky .org). A simple test suggests this technique works better that this new search thing.

By: damn dirty ape

damn dirty ape — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:04:04 -0800

This is better than the big search box on the front page of Wikipedia how? Its pretty unforgiving for misspelled words or if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. I'd rather google donate a software and hardware to bring it up to web search standards than go through another middleman.

By: knapah

knapah — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:09:13 -0800

As regards firefox, Doesn't it come "out of the box" with 'wp' as the keyword for wikipedia searches? I just type "wp search_term" into the address bar and up pops the page.

By: Twang

Twang — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:10:25 -0800

@allkindsoftime Thanks! Like the tag cloud ... like to browse subject areas w/WP and this is a new way ... and the external links with the details and without having to scroll to pagebottom. Far superior to WP search and better than Google. In addition Wikiseek is easy to add to the Firefox Searchengines bar.

By: designbot

designbot — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:13:58 -0800

Its pretty unforgiving for misspelled words or if you don't know exactly what you are looking for. This is better than the big search box on the front page of Wikipedia how?

By: delmoi

delmoi — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:42:58 -0800

How exactly is it a "better" way to search wikipedia? Almost all the time I want information about something, I can type it into the address bar as http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/whatever. If that doesn't work I'll google. nine times out of ten, a wikipedia article will come up on the top search results on google, even without adding "wikipedia" to the search query. That said, wikipedia's internal search sucks balls, and it never did me any good, not once. If this thing works out better, then great. And yeah the ad sense is a little annoying, but most users won't even notice that. It will be interesting to see if this things Alexia rank in a month.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:43:51 -0800

I just type "wp search_term" into the address bar and up pops the page. So it does. Thanks!

By: jefgodesky

jefgodesky — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:50:42 -0800

But not as good as wikipedia.clusty.com. I still say that you can't call yourself a great search engine if you require that kind of arcane knowledge of "Google-fu" from your users. The onus is on the designer, not the user; that's not a sign of a good search engine, that's just poor design.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:50:59 -0800

Paragon's method is the one that I favor. Although the "I'm feeling lucky" variant, less work than it looks, is using the address bar history, typing "en", cursoring to a wikipedia url, and backspacing to /wiki/ then typing in your term. I swear it seems easier to me, but I can type 80wpm -- faster than I can move to my mouse and click. In any case, anything is better and more flexible than the built-in Wikipedia search bar. The Foundation does not, to say the least, have the server farm resources that Google does. Google is the best way to search (emphasis) Wikipedia. Now, big caveat on the "trusted sites" thing. In fact, most editors expect that as the site moves into the top ten -- most probably -- in 2007, it will become an even greater target than it has been for linkspam. With that said, I think there is a Google PageRank analogue that can be derived from the Wikipedia subset alone that isn't any worse than Google's own results-spam problem. At this moment, a few Wikiseek searches seem to be reasonably good subsets of material -- CNN, Washington Post, that sort of thing, as opposed to a gazillion blog results in the top 10 or 20 just because of incestuous blog linking. So in that respect there is an improvement. I worry in the long run about being able to game systems like this, though, and how that could affect the Wikipedia project. I doubt it would be a direct target of any spam efforts, being obscure at this point, but it would be susceptible to anything targeting Wikipedia itself unless they were to constantly adjust their own PageRank-analog algorithm. I do think it's interesting how they separate the on-Wikipedia results from the off-Wikipedia results.

By: empath

empath — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:59:29 -0800

i usually just drop 'wiki whatever' in the google search bar and wikipedia pops up in the top 3 links 90% of the time.

By: tommunation

tommunation — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:13:40 -0800

For a while now, I've been using "wiki" as a prefix to something I want to find in Wikipedia. It always seems to work...isn't it an officially bit in Google function like "dict" for dictionary?

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:29:25 -0800

Dave's Quick Search Deskbar wik Apples Also supports imdb, amaz, ebay, and just about everybody else. Including, of course, gg, yh and msns, just try to guess which search engines those are :P It also does math and it can launch applications. And, it supports aliasing, for me that means yhmf %search term% gives me a yahoo search of metafilter, with a few tweaks. In fact, what you really have to ask yourself is, is there anything it can't do?

By: tehloki

tehloki — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:28:43 -0800

I've always wondered why wikipedia's search function is so infuriatingly useless.

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:42:04 -0800

A combination of typing in the search box and clicking on "Refine by category" once something close to what your looking for pops up in there seems to work very well.

By: lekvar

lekvar — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:07:16 -0800

You can usually jump right to the appropriate article by placing the thing in question into the URL. F'rinstance, if I want to find out about foo all I have to do is type "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/foo". Actually, with modern browser's auto-complete function all I have to do is type "en" and then append the address at the end.

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:51:25 -0800

er... it does actually seem to do a little more than that you know.

By: lekvar

lekvar — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:00:19 -0800

Yes, but not quickly or efficiently enough to bother with.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 21:37:19 -0800

Wow, it found Monkey Butter on the first try.

By: tehloki

tehloki — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:54:36 -0800

Wikipedia's search is much more useful for obscure things with specific origins.. but for obscure things part of a common category, it hasn't given me any decent results.

By: darkness

darkness — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:30:18 -0800

I work there :-)