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Read it, comment, and share it with your friendsWikipedia is the Internet Directory and Vertical Search Engine in one
I’m not a huge fan of Wikipedia, but I’ve been using it now and then in the past and I’ve noticed a few purposes it serves unintentionally that other sites have failed to serve as their main goals.
Remember the Open Directory project? The tagline says,
“Help build the largest human-edited directory of the web.”
It has, currently, 4,830,584 sites, 75,151 editors, and over 590,000 categories. In terms of the size of the web, this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg… it’s more like a molecule of it. The problem with the ODP is that 75,000 editors trying to catalog the web is a lot like me, alone, trying to copy all the books ever written by hand… and I write very slowly.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, has a large number of “official” editors, but it also allows anyone who visits to edit any page in the site. Even though this opens up a Pandora’s box of problems about accuracy of information and disputes over controversies, it does make it a lot easier for Wikipedia to serve as a “human-edited directory of the web,” and that’s exactly what it has become. Just visit the page for Kanye’s song “Stronger” or the Apple iPhone and you’ll find both references and external links at the bottom of the page that point to other websites related to that topic. You can’t navigate these links as easily as digging through the categories in the ODP, but you can search Wikipedia to reach them.
Which brings me to the next purpose that Wikipedia servers: vertical search. Interestingly enough, there’s a new Wiki-based vertical search engine, Mahalo, which has been mentioned over at Wisdump, and it’s arguably a good attempt at building a vertical search engine. Still, in my opinion Wikipedia is the best vertical search engine available right now. It definitely has more content than any other Wiki-project out there, and it provides a lot of information about anything you find on it. If I had to choose between using Mahalo or Wikipedia as my vertical search engine of choice, I would choose Wikipedia without hesitation.
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7 Comments
Responses to my articleWikipedia is much better right now, I agree.
Mahalo is in Alpha right now, and only has a fraction of the content it will have in a year.
I suggest comparing the external links for something like Paris Hotels, iPhone, Corvette, and Asthma on Mahalo and Wikipedia. I think you’ll see that Mahalo is more comprehensive in terms of a search experience and Wikipedia is more comprehensive in terms of an encyclopedia experience. We are going for the serch/guide experience obviously, and as such our pages head-to-head will always be more optimized for search than Wikipedia–or even DMOZ (which is sadly filled with spam and SEOs posing as guides.. grrrrrrrrrrr).
Mahalo for checking us out!
Jason
also, checkout the Mahalo Greenhouse where 300 freelancers (many from DMOZ/ODP and Wikipedia) are writing search results.
Wikipedia often serves well as a directory of useful pages on the internet. Unfortunately, their policies tend to get in the way of this. Try to find information about an obscure band, and chances are someone will have deleted it due to lack of “notability”.
I agree, and honestly, I don’t give Mahalo any chance at all. The concept is too narrow, the top 10k search queries are not enough, but we’ll have to wait. Right now, wikipedia and wikia.com IMHO are the best locations to start searching (for non-experienced Googlers).
@Liam, most of time any site/directory will have the ‘lack of notability’ problem. DMOZ didn’t use to have this problem because there were times a DMOZ entry was important for webmasters. Nowadays Google finds you no matter what.
Hi, just wanted to mention our site, www.sputtr.com. It’s not a man-powered search engine, but rather gives users the power to search many, many popular places from one site (not quite like a metasearch engine, since we don’t compile results.. which is way too sloooow!), but we like to call it a multi-search. Go give it a try, customize the page by adding/removing buttons, and feel free to let us know what you think.
Steffen
I used to hate Wikipedia and referred to it “as the boring site”. It’s actually one of the most useful sites I’ve come across and the spamming and trolling can sometimes be very humorous
You know what I would love to see? A blog that tracks spam on Wikipedia and takes screenshots of it. That would be hilarious.
Interesting post. I have found myself using more and more Wikipedia lately… at the end the search mechanism I use is the following: When I want to find information about a general topic I start with Google, then If I really want to have an authorative concept or specific description I use Wikipedia, if it is something new or I want to know where is the most popular content I go to Delicious.
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