GooWiki is a Firefox Extension that tracks how often Google search results reference Wikipedia articles on the first page. I was compelled to create GooWiki when I began noticing how Google was returning Wikipedia links for like 2/3 of my searches. I started thinking, "Is Google really being reduced to a Wikipedia wrapper?" I asked several of my friends to guess the rate at which Google searches yield Wikipedia results, and the estimates ranged from 40% to 70%. Rather than rely on mere estimates however, I decided to take a scientific approach by way of Firefox Extensions!

This was my first time writing an extension for Firefox, but after learning about RDF, XUL, Mozilla's Chrome framework, Mozilla's internal service interfaces, and some quick review of advanced Javascript, I was ready to go. Some notable features I added are Wikipedia result highlighting, inline stats reporting, posting stats to a database, and all these features are implemented as options you can easily enable/disable. If you want, GooWiki can be 100% silent and unnoticeable!

You must have the latest version of Firefox (currently 1.5.x) to use GooWiki. Make sure you check the Firefox Extension Manager periodically for GooWiki updates. GooWiki is free software and released under The GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2.