Wikiseek was a

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

that indexed English Wikipedia pages and pages that were linked to from Wikipedia articles. The search engine was funded by a Palo Alto based

Internet startup The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

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

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

. 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 As of 2008 it is no longer active.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. Wikiseek has made financial contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation, and the group-edited blog, TechCrunch 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, wordle or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation of text data, which is often used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually single word ...

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

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

References

External links

TechCrunch Article
Domain-specific search engines Defunct internet search engines {{searchengine-website-stub