At first sight, the home page of memoid.ru looks similar to those less than ordinary news aggregation sites which collect and group news headlines and then lead you to a page with news text accepted via RSS or other syndication protocol.
But a landing page of memoid.ru is appended by an encyclopaedic article which gives additional information about the main topic of the news. According to the rumours came from project owners, the "Poiskovye Tekhnologye" (The Technologies of Search) company, which is partially owned by Ashmanov & Partners company, well known for their antagonism to the Wikipedia, these academic articles are written by expects in their field and corrected by professional editors, both yet unknown (sic!), and thus are of better quality than Wikipedia.
Also the rumours say the functionality of the site hasn't implemented in full yet. E.g. it will have a search functionality which will lead users directly to academic articles according to the user queries.
I guess the combination of a news article and an academic article in one web page is an attempt to accept more traffic from both news and organic search engines. Likely alternative solutions of combining news feeds with the Wikipedia will follow.
A close look on these "academic" articles suggested that they look like manually edited clusters compiled from numerous sources by a news aggregator.
So it looks like a semi-automatic wikipedization of a news stream (frankly, I don't know how they produce such content indeed). Though they have dropped the possibility to edit/add by crowd.
It seems Cuil.com is mastering something similar: Cpedia.com. See Introducing Cpedia, the automated encyclopaedia.
Vital differences are: Cpedia is fully automated and it isn't intended to be feeded into results of other search engines. 🙂
What is "RU" about this site?