Monday, May 26, 2008

Qwika.com, a wiki search engine

What Company Is Offering:
Qwika.com, a wiki search engine. The technology is designed from the ground up to work with wiki-based content and has a number of unique features of interest to researchers and Wikipedia editors. It is the only search engine to index machine translated content, so that users may search for terms in their own language and see results translated from English.

"Wikipedia's growth in English is well documented, but other languages lag far behind. The next biggest is German, roughly a third of the size of the English one. Spanish is a mere tenth of the size" says Luke Metcalfe, founder of the site. "There is thus a massive gap in the market."

The resultant content is machine translated, so it contains imperfections, but are still much better than no article at all and further, provide a starting point for editors to translate manually into their own language. Languages included are German, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese and Russian.

In addition, some country-specific topics are covered best in their native language. Qwika makes this content available to English speakers, rolling it all into the one index. Articles from all 11 languages are included in the English language version.

The engine also includes WikiTravel and aims to include all sizeable wikis. "Wikis are cropping up on a variety of topics and approaches to community. We'd like to see this diversity flourish while still providing the user with a central location for such public encyclopedia-style content".

More at:http://www.qwika.com/

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