A Better Wikipedia Utility Search

If you use any of the various desktop searching utility tools like Alfred, Quicksilver, or LaunchBar, you’ll like this.

Searching Wikipedia with a direct query is really annoying. It’s been forever, and they still can’t do a good job helping you find things you’ll commonly mess up:

• Misspelling a famous name
• Missing the proper-case or hyphen in a name
• Not knowing exactly what the thing you want is called

Most of this gets you a “Wikipedia doesn’t haven an article titled…” page. Pretty much useless.

Thankfully, Google does a much better job of searching Wikipedia. This the Google URL for finding an article titled “Soup” on Wikipedia:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:wikipedia.org+Soup

(You can prefix the wikpedia.org with en. to only search in English.) Adding the btnI variable to the URL query string lets you do a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. You can use this to build a much better custom Wikipedia search for your utility tool:

Alfred custom search URL:
http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=site:wikipedia.org+{query}

Quicksilver custom search URL:
http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=site:wikipedia.org+***

LaunchBar custom search URL:
http://www.google.com/search?btnI&q=site:wikipedia.org+*

Now you can type what you want with a lot more freedom into the Wikipedia search and actually find it. For example, you can search for “long word” and you’ll get the article “Longest word in English”. Or you can search for “branston pickle” and get the article “Branston (food)”.