Yahoo Digs Its Claws Deeper into Wikipedia

Yahoo Search has a new feature to pinpoint specific details within Wikipedia-created Web pages that show up in its search results.

The development is part of the tit-for-tat arms race that Yahoo, Google and other search engines are engaged in. Because each business is advertising-based, new features, especially exclusive ones, can drive more revenue-creating traffic.

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia written and edited by anyone who cares to do so.

As a pioneer, Wikipedia has been both publicly lauded for its forward-thinking and derided for embarrassments, such as recently discovered hoax entries.

/zimages/5/28571.gifRead morehereabout the hoax.

Another knock on Wikipedia is its entries can sometimes be enormously difficult to navigate through. Someone using the terms “coffee” and “Wikipedia” on Googles search engine is left with a multiple page entry to comb for the specific detail being hunted.

Wikipedia entries returned by Yahoo Search now contain a feature called quick links, which when clicked on jumps to a specific portion of the Wikipedia entry.

For example, a Yahoo search for “soda” and “Wikipedia” offered up opportunities to steer the Web browser directly to sections on international variations, North American and Australian.

The additional feature is meant to help users “quickly get to the exact information youre looking for,” Kalpana Ravinarayanan of Yahoo Search wrote on the official company blog.

It also is unique to Yahoo, or so a spokesman for the company believes, which gives Yahoo a leg up on its competitors.

/zimages/5/28571.gifRead morehereabout open-source content, ala Wikipedia.

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