Posted on Monday, February 20, 2006 @ 09:45:00 EST by xtv
Rapid Intelligence, a search technology company with a focus on data mining and computational linguistics, has today released a beta of Qwika.com, a wiki search engine.
San Francisco, CA, USA, February 19, 2006 -- 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."
The service aims to be an alternative search for Wikipedia. At the time of writing this press release, all of Wikipedia was suffering an outage, and its search is often down.
Some examples: http://www.qwika.com/find/dark_lunacy - Finds the Spanish version (no english article exists) http://www.qwika.com/find/der_spiegel - German translated version contains more information
than the english one. http://www.qwika.com/find/australia - Wikipedia and WikiTravel http://www.qwika.com/find/helmut_kohl - Many languages and talk page.
About Rapid Intelligence: Rapid Intelligence is a web and search technology company. Its other titles include FactBites, featured in BusinessWeek, a search engine/encyclopedia hybrid that provides point form topic summaries as results, and NationMaster, the world's largest database for comparing countries online, which has received warm
reviews from CNN, the BBC, The New York Times and the American Library Association.
About Wikipedia: Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written by volunteers on an ongoing basis, backed by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its aim is to create and distribute a freely available encyclopedia in as many languages as possible. According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has been ranked in the top 30 most trafficked websites throughout 2006.
Contact: Luke Metcalfe Rapid Intelligence +612
8221 9721
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