One of the most sought-after and important online encyclopaedias around, Wikipedia.org is aiming to turn into something bigger and better than just a simple online encyclopaedia. The Wikimedia Foundation announced into foray into the world of ‘search’ with a Knowledge Engine Project. We at Web Media Infotech have closely followed the recent developments at Wikimedia. Here’s what we found:

According to the reports by The Register, the Knight Foundation approved a grant of $250,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia. Approved on September, 2015, the grant read:
“The grant is to be used as follows: To advance new models for finding information by supporting stage one development of the Knowledge Engine by Wikipedia, a system for discovering reliable and trustworthy public information on the Internet.”

Let’s take a look into certain details of the project:

1. Does Wikipedia want to be yet another search engine on the block?

Well, not really; the Wikimedia Foundation does not want the Wikipedia.org to resemble another traditional search engine. However, considering the development process and the grant, Wikipedia’s new venture may have a major impact on the search engines, including Bing, Yahoo, Google and so on.

2. What is the Knowledge Engine trying to do?

Well, as known to all, when a query is searched, in every traditional search engine, Wikipedia always has a high rank. However, once the query is solved, or even if the user is still using the information provided by Wikipedia, the user goes back to the traditional search engine’s aiming to find more content. The Knowledge Engine is trying to change this stance so that Wikipedia gains all the popularity and gain a strong foothold in the industry. Ask our SEO guys at Web Media Infotech, and they will agree!

3. In other words, it is trying to fill in the gap that CirrusSearch wasn’t able to fulfil.

CirrusSearch is the name of the search infrastructure of Wikipedia. As known to all, CirrusSearch’s interface is not at all half as smooth as the other search engines. Hence, people used to resort to the aid of other search engines to find a Wikipedia article itself. So, while Wikipedia doesn’t want to reduce its alliance with other search engines, this is definitely going to harm the popularity of Bing, Google, etc.