Surfwax releases "quick index" to 600k Wikipedia terms

March 22, 2005

Surfwax, Inc., a metasearch engine and knowledge-tool provider announced its release of Wikiwax, a new portal for searching Wikipedia article titles. This is the latest addition to its offerings of narrowly focused search portals, such as its News Accumulator and ShopEasier shopping portal.

Wikiwax claims to index over 600,000 Wikipedia terms, and its list of titles was last updated sometime in March, 2005. Once you enter terms into the search field, a menu of matching titles is shown; selecting one of the titles takes you directly to its Wikipedia entry.

Wikiwax uses a Surfwax feature called LookAhead to suggest auto-completions of search terms as a user types them. It matches both articles whose titles start with the search terms, and articles containing those terms in that order. For example, a search for "Wales, Jimmy" would find the article "Jimmy Wales". A search for "The Earth" would also match "The Earth Stood Still, The Day". Surfwax offered visitors this manner of LookAhead auto-complete searching for over a year.

Other Surfwax projects include Nextaris, an all-in-one "information exchange" portal offering searching/uploading/sharing/publishing/social-networking, and search packages targeted to specific industries, such as the Surfwax Scholar portal offered to educational institutions.