Thanks to reading blogs such as Dave Winer’s old Scripting News, I learned pretty early on about Google, and was taken by the simplicity of their search page, which loaded fast. This was quite unlike most sites of the time (around 2000, I believe), which were smitten with portal mania, trying to serve up everything on their home page.

Google is still a mainstay for me, though it’s beginning to show its age, such as in the area of blog search. Another site that’s become a constant resource of late is Wikipedia which, despite its imperfections/potential inaccuracies, is often an even better place to start a search than Google. Unfortunately, sometimes their main page doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, even at broadband speeds, so I began wondering if they, too, had a simple search page that could be bookmarked in place of the main page.

I didn’t see any obvious link to such a page on their main pages, but after experimenting a little came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=&fulltext=Search

This just gives you a simple page with an empty search box. Of course, I guess you could change the “en”at the beginning of the url to your language of choice, and see if that works, too.

Now my WP button on my Safari bookmark bar is set to this, so whenever I need to search Wikipedia, it’s right there.