I really am trying to not get distracted by the Mojeek API, but people keep saying how bad Web search is right now, and the more they say that the more I think of other options.

I very much like the way Mojeek offers the ability to “focus” your search by limiting it to a set of up to 25 domains — limiting your search to a specific set of domains lets you do general searches with focused, useful results if you’ve chosen them wisely. Mojeek even offers some templates like dictionary, time, and recipes to get you started. But the problem remains that you have to set up the focus domains yourself, which means swimming around in the increasingly-infosewaged web looking for relevant sites.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a tool to automatically make those site sets for a focused Mojeek search? Where you could search for groups of Web sites organized in all kinds of different ways, and then apply them to a Mojeek search?

You can if you mash up Mojeek with Wikipedia!

Here’s my “Wikijeek” mashup: Find Wikipedia categories relevant to your search topic with a keyword search and pick one. The program identifies the category pages with web sites, sorts those pages by popularity (according to Wikipedia page views), and adds the top 25 pages’ web sites to a Mojeek search with your query. In the example below I’ve used the query “whiskey” to find the category “Whiskies of the United States” and from there searched a set of 10 sites found in that category for the term “barrel aging,” which, because it’s contextualized by *where* we’re searching, leads to a set of focused results.

You’re using the expertise of the Wikipedia editors and the interest of the Wikipedia audience to identify useful sets of Web sites on the fly without needing a lot of knowledge yourself.

I’ve got some ideas about making the set of domains to search even better but I think I’m going to let it simmer a bit. I also need to keep working on my Google Alerts replacement!