Wikipedia for teaching and research

Hot off the back of news that ‘Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool‘ comes the launch of semantic search enginge Powerset, whose ‘natural language search technology … has read 2.5 million Wikipedia pages and extracted “meaning” from the sentences, creating a navigation and semantic layer on top of the popular Web encyclopedia.’

I’ve been playing around with the beta this morning and I like it. The results are far more ‘intelligent’ than the rather clunky Wikipedia search engine which generally returns zero/lame results unless you get the search criteria exactly right. Powerset has also indexed Freebase, Metaweb’s open structured database. Makes me wonder what happened to Google’s prototype search engine project Searchmash, which always returned a far wider assortment of relevant links whenever I used it.

As a bit of fun, you can also monitor your own web footprint at Addict-o-matic, a quick and easy way of seeing where your site shows up across various web aggregators.