How to Get Better Wikipedia Search

Gary Eckstein Internet 0 , , , ,

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I, as do millions of others, use Wikipedia very often. The default Wikipedia Search however lets down this great Online encyclopedia.The default Wikipedia Search is good at returning results where the search term is identical to the Page however is not all that great where the name of the page is not known or is incorrectly spelt.

For example, suppose we search, using the default Wikipedia Search, for bush turkey. As per the results shown below, there is no page called ‘Bush Turkey‘ so Wikipedia offers us the choice of three pages which may be related. No context is given how the three pages relate to ‘Bush Turkey’ so I’m really not sure which of the three results is most likely to be related to my requirements for information about ‘Bush Turkey’ (my search term).

Enter Google Custom Search for Wikipedia. The good folks at Google decided to offer all of us a far better Wikipedia Search experience. Now when we search for terms which don’t have a dedicated Wikipedia Page, the familiar and powerful Google Search Results are returned showing all Wikipedia results related to my search term. So, for our bush turkey search term we now get the far better search results as below (notice that a few contextual words are returned from the Wikipedia Page which relates to my search term):

So, how can you realise the far better Google Custom Search results for Wikipedia? Simple, just go to the Google Custom Search for Wikipedia Page and follow the instructions. The default Wikipedia Search will be relpaced with Google Search.

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