FAQ - Common Questions

Wikatu News Search is currently in development

1.) What is Wikatu?

Wikatu is an independent, lightweight news search engine with its own index and crawler. It continuously aggregates hundreds of news sources on current topics, providing an efficient way to quickly discover the latest and most relevant subjects.

2.) Where can I submit or remove my source?

Submit a source: To add your source, please use the submission form in the settings menu (at the top right of the search page) or feel free to drop an email. It may take up to a month for Wikatu to fully integrate a new source. During the first weeks, while adjusting, only a limited number of articles may appear in the search results.

Remove a source: Please contact Wikatu, ideally using an email address that matches the domain of the source URL to be removed.

Further Information: News links are checked for existence at progressively decreasing intervals and removed automatically whenever a relevant HTTP status gets returned.

3.) How up-to-date are the search results?

Wikatu aims to provide relevant and interesting search results with an optimized, compact index. The latest topics, places, dates, and keywords from daily news events are continuously identified by an advanced computer algorithm, aiming for up-to-date and relevant findings. Currently, news up to 365 days old can be searched for.

4.) I can't find a specific news article (from a certain source)

Wikatu strives to find diverse results. New headlines are indexed only if they haven’t appeared in exactly the same form within the past month (title, article snippet).

5.) Does Wikatu respect the Robots Exclusion Standards?

Wikatu processes and respects robots.txt, as well as the noindex directive in the robots meta tag and the rel attribute with a nofollow value, except in certain defined cases. Robots.txt files of news sources are temporarily stored and updated every 1–3 days.

6.) How can I detect the Wikatu News Crawler?

The Wikatu News Bot identifies itself as "Wikatu News Search".
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Wikatu News Search/2.0; U; Linux x86_64)

7.) What technologies does Wikatu use?