Wikio
Encyclopedia
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an online portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
for news
News
News is the communication of selected information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience.- Etymology :...
and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s. It was launched on June 19, 2006 in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
and is also available in other countries since 2007.
Unlike other search engines for news, such as Google News
Google News
Google News is a free news aggregator provided by Google Inc, selecting recent items from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm....
, Wikio receives its information from different media
Media (communication)
In communications, media are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data...
. It references news pages as well as blogs, consumer’s subjective website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
s and merchants’ pages in five languages: English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
.
History
Wikio was founded by Pierre Chappaz, who had previously developed the price comparison service KelkooKelkoo
The website Kelkoo is a European price comparison service founded in France in 1999, allowing customers to find information on products they want to purchase, including price and seller information. It was bought by Yahoo! in 2004...
which was sold to Yahoo in 2004. Wikio News and the firms Ebuzzing, Nomao, OverBlog, Wikio Buzz and Wikio Experts form the Wikio Group
Wikio Group
The Wikio Group is a group of online startup enterprises in the field of social media marketing. It includes the brands Ebuzzing, Nomao, Overblog, Wikio News, Wikio Buzz and Wikio Experts....
.
Operating Mode
Through Wikio, users can create their own personalised news pages in order to follow news or topics. They can subscribe to selected media and blogs as well as receive all news for a certain keyword. Wikio offers an RSS feed for each page and each category that can be added to any RSS reader.The English version of Wikio contains information of over 200 000 media and blogs. Worldwide, Wikio references over two million sources in five languages.
By voting for an article, the users can influence the news ranking directly. The most popular entries with the most votes are classified as the best and are the first to be seen on Wikio. Furthermore, the users can comment on articles and create some themselves.
Blog ranking
On every 5th of the month, Wikio publishes its ranking of blogs in different categories. To ensure a certain quality of the blogs’ content, the ranking is created depending upon the number of tweetsTwitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
and the weight and number of backlink
Backlink
Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page...
s on a blog, which means the links that lead to that specific blog from different websites. Thus, Wikio is generating a ranking which is as up to date and representative as possible. The bloggers can show their position in Wikio’s ranking with a badge on their blog.
Tools and Widgets
Wikio offers different tools for bloggers and webmasters. By merging several existing buttons, the Wikio tools aid at facilitating the online communication. Furthermore, by referencing websites and blogs on Wikio, the online visibility for more readers will be improved.Technical aspects
Wikio is using a semantic searchSemantic search
Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Author Seth Grimes lists "11 approaches that join...
engine developed by the French software company Sinequa
Sinequa
Sinequa is a French search engine.Sinequa provides an enterprise search solution that targets unified search, expertise location , enterprise 2.0 and e-enterprise enablement...
.
In September 2008, Wikio launched Wikio Labs, an online research lab. There, new projects, which are still in their beta format, are shared with users to obtain their feedback. Wikio Labs is supervised by Jean Véronis, a French university professor in the field of informatics
Informatics (academic field)
Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information...
who is specialised in Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
.
International development
Wikio is available in five European countries (FranceFrance
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
) and in the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.