Whilst you’ll find any of those 3.4 million articles in English at the click of a button, the next most popular language, German only has a third of that. Many other languages are available, but have less than 100,000 articles available.

With such a rich source of knowledge on tap, more must be done to support the translation effort. Enter WikiBhasha from Microsoft Research in India. It’s a browser-based tool which creates an overlay on top of the Wikipedia website. The user selects an English language article, which is machine translated by WikiBhasha. You can then make any edits you wish to the translation before submitting the article back to Wikipedia in your native language.

It’s not just about translation – the tool can also be used to create, edit and submit new articles to Wikipedia.

WikiBhasha is set to be offered as a user gadget on Wikipedia as well as in the form of a MediaWiki extension, so it’ll be available for translating the huge library of wikis which are powered by the open source software. Whilst the current release focuses on the translation of English language articles, future iterations will include support for articles in other source languages which can be translated into English.

Check out this great profile of WikiBasha and its authors over at the Microsoft Research website.

Back in 2007, XKCD created a fantastic map of some of those online dwelling places, including names that still shine bright, such as the Gulf of YouTube, Wikipedia Island, and Deviant Art plus other fading stars like Friendster, Second Life and AOL. 

Charting such perilous, changing seas requires constant vigilance, and as reported by TechCrunch, the XKCD cartographers have been busy updating their maps, releasing an all new view of the globe as it appears here in 2010. Dominated by the lands of Facebook, Twitter and yes, Farmville(!) the world is a very different place three years on, and is even more dangerous.

For the first time the Charred Wasteland of Abandoned Social Networks, the plains of People You Can’t Unfriend and the Great Firewall (near China) have been carefully mapped in full colour to ensure you know where you’re headed.

The only question, which lands will shrink, and which mountains will rise in the next three years?

Check out the map, (and order a poster) over at XKCD.

When you’re searching for something which has a Wikipedia entry, for example, you’ll notice a “one box” result for Wikipedia at the top of your search results page. The result provides a snippet of text from the Wikipedia article along with links to the article subsections, too. However, clicking the link “Enhanced View” actually takes you to a special kind of search result right within Bing.com – the Bing Reference result. Here’s an example of a search for “Albert Einstein:

When you click the “Enhanced View” link, you’ll end up on another Bing.com page which is actually just the Wikipedia page framed within Bing.com. You’ll still have Bing’s search box at the top of the page and the “Explore” sidebar to the left. However, the sidebar here may link to other verticals (like image search, for example) but also to related queries. To see an example of related queries, check out the Bing Reference page for “Facebook.” In the Explore sidebar there are links to applications, services, developer platform, proxy, and history. Click on any of those links to be immediately taken to a new set of search results for that term. 

So why are these Bing Reference pages better than simply hitting up the Wikipedia article itself? Well, for one thing, related searches as described above are only a click away. Or if you need to move on to a specific vertical like “news” or “videos” those links are not just up at the top of the page, but they’re pinned above the article itself:

Plus, the page displays the Wikipedia “Article Outline” in a box to the right of the content which stays with you even as you scroll up and down the page. That’s really handy! And it has a “top” button attached to it that moves you back up to the very top of the page whenever you’re done reading – quite helpful for when you’re navigating around a long article:

To search within the Bing Reference vertical directly, you must start your search from within one of these “enhanced” Wikipedia pages. But when you do, you’ll have another powerful feature at your disposal: highlighting. For example, look at this query for “who acquired Texaco” to see the highlighting turned on. Thanks to Powerset technology’s ability to understand natural language, Bing also knows that’s a much different query than say “who did Texaco acquire” even though other search engines would not.

I still wish there was a link to go to Bing Reference directly, like say Bing.com/reference, (hint, hint!), but overall, these features make for a much better way to research topics than doing a typical web search. Next time you need to quickly “look something up,” try Bing.com instead and see what you think. Or better yet, set Bing as your default search engine so you don’t even have to remember to make the switch.

You can buy this app for $20 if you don’t have a storage card – the company will ship you one. If you just want to download it onto a card you already own, then it’s only $9.99. You can check out more info on the WikiPock homepage. 

The socially, hyper-connected revolution we are living through will have significant impact on the future. Not only of our social, after-hours work lives: but also within the cube-farm.

Watch the video. How will your live be changes where everyone in your world streams their consciousness online?

Live Search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%+

IMDB: http://search.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=%+

Dictionary Search: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=%+

Now what I need to know is how I can use all of them - the gpedit.msc section (see earlier instructions on this) only lets you pick one. I want them all! Any ideas?

1. Press Windows Key + R and type in gpedit.msc, click "OK"
2. Open the User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Instant Search\Custom Instant Search Internet Search provider policy setting.
3. Enable the policy setting, type Search Wikipedia in the first textbox and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%w in the second textbox, and click OK.
4. Open a command prompt and type gpupdate/force to immediately apply the new policy setting.

After you do that, you'll see 3 search options: in addition to "Search Everywhere" and "Search the Internet", you'll now see "Search Wikipdedia," too! How cool is that?

This probably works for all languages, if you substitute "en" with your country's code.