Alternative search engine Qwiki is now open to the public

Qwiki, an innovative search product, is a service that from its very inception has been the target of praise. The company won the most recent TechCrunch Disrupt, putting them under a large spotlight.

We gave away 500 alpha invites when the service was young. Today the company is leaving its private alpha and is opening to the world. Qwiki, if you did not know, does this:

Qwiki is software that strings together content from sites such as Wikipedia, Google, Fotopedia and YouTube, and presents that content in a narrated, multimedia format called a “Qwiki.”

If you have never used it, it is nothing at all like a regular search engine. You enter a term, and a narrated slideshow is read to you. The aggregated information that is presented is both concise, and in-depth. Aside from the robot-voice that can be awkward, Qwiki has become a very powerful tool.

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The problem with any service like Qwiki that requires results to be pre-developed is the size of its index. In other words, how many entries are there in Qwiki for you to find? Despite being a young company previously in private alpha, Qwiki has over 3 million entries, built based on search term popularity, meaning that most of the time Qwiki will have what you are looking for.

Here at TNW we have long been fans of the Qwiki service, so much so that we think that it is a ripe acquisition target for Microsoft’s Bing empire.

Today’s release out of beta also includes a number of new features for the service, including “the ability to embed links, share Qwikis with others online, contribute content and view a clickable list of all of the information contained within each Qwiki.”

What are you waiting for, go to Qwiki and see if there is a page dedicated to you. This one is all mine. Note: the service is set to leave private alpha at 12 pm PST. When you read this, if it is not live, they are running behind schedule.