January marks the first time Wikipedia has made the top ten list of most popular Web sites in the U.S.

In a report from comScore Networks, the online encyclopedia officially came in ninth with 42.9 million unique visitors last month, just behind Ask Network with 49 million and ahead of The New York Times (#10). This is a significant improvement over last January where it languished in 33rd place with 18.3 million unique visitors.

Much of Wikipedia’s recent U.S. success may be attributed to some generosity from Google. A report from Hitwise indicates that Google traffic to Wikipedia is up 166% Year over Year. The analysis showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia’s upstream visits came from search engines – 50% from Google alone.

The …

Wikiseek is a new specialized search engine launched by Searchme, Inc. Wikiseek differentiates itself by limiting its searches to Wikipedia pages and those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia.

By restricting its indexes to the Wikipedia network, the results of Wikiseek are touted as being more authoritative and therefore less subject to spam and manipulation by SEO experts.

With fewer pages indexed, Wikiseek holds the capabilities to be faster than the current search engines. And by utilizing Searchme’s patented refinement technology to suggest search refinements, the results will be more relevant.

Wikiseek makes use of a tag cloud to help refine search results based on related subject matter. Other search enhancements include a Firefox search plugin as well as a Javascript-based extension that alters actual Wikipedia pages to add a Wikiseek search button.

Wikipedia.org has notoriously limited search capabilities and …