A new search engine that only indexes Wikipedia and sites that it links to, WikiSeek, launched today. Wikiseek will not, however, be formally announced until Wednesday. As TechCrunch reports:

WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.

This development should really change the importance of the open-source encyclopedia. Many firms will now have even more of a vested interested in creating and defending the content about themselves on Wikipedia. Indeed, I could see many multi-nationals with large PR budgets dedicating staff just to maintaining their profiles on Wikipedia once Wikiseek catches on.