Thirteen Million Wikipedia Paragraphs at your Fingertips | Hacker News Reader

Thirteen Million Wikipedia Paragraphs at your Fingertips

duckduckgo.com

27 pointsepi0Bauqu19 comments

The info box is cool but the layout of it is really annoying. Since it's a div, I can't resize it and scrolling to the bottom scrolls the page down as well when I hit the bottom so the whole thing is very jarring.

It would be a lot better if the text were simply in a textarea instead of a div so that I could resize the box (in Chrome at least, IE is screwed either way) when I want to read it.

Thanks for the suggestions--I'll give it a second look. It scrolls the box first, then the page. But yeah, if you overshoot like with a mouse wheel, then the page eventually scrolls. I was resistant to a textarea because people think they are for typing in them.

Hmm, you're right.

Maybe something like this then?

http://jqueryui.com/demos/resizable/

I've noticed that these days, Google's answers to search questions are generally "why don't you try Wikipedia?"

These days, the Web is somewhere between three and five titans plus a complex of secondary sites (specialist wikis, newspaper sites, news aggregators, major blogs), with a background noise that chiefly consists of spammers mirroring 90% of Wikipedia to improve their search-engine rankings.

So, in a way, this search engine is inevitable -- but I wouldn't have imagined it as early as thirty minutes ago, so it's probably not inevitable, just an idea so good that you forget that it ever didn't exist.

"Duck It!" seems to work _really_ well, too; I'm switching. My only concern is that "Duck It!" doesn't include a way of telling you whether a given paragraph is true or false...

Good point on the try or false, which is why we don't promote that stuff into the Zero-click Info boxes. I have some ideas on how to address that problem, however. It should be one of the next major feature improvements.

You're absolutely right about major sites ruling content. However, I'd add to that there are many vertical search engines that do a great job searching more deep content in their verticals.

Originally one of the things I wanted to do was be a conduit to those engines, but throwing the user there proved too jarring a UI experience. So all that code was commented out. I'm now looking for good ways to revive it.

Considering the wiki nature of wikipedia a useful alternative for true/false could be the stability of a given paragraph, i.e. if it has received an high rate of revisions lately. Assigning a "true" or "false" value seems a more complex operation that involves comparing different site's contents/assigning weight to these sites and so on, it's surely harder being able to get something objectively meaningful.

From playing around with DuckIt, I agree, there's more information out there than I'd imagined -- it's just strangled by a thick forest of spam, which you have devised a superb method of clearing.

My comment on the accuracy of zero-click info was inspired by an "acid-test" test search that turned up some zero-click information that was excellent, but some that was howlingly wrong. "Iberians" produces _splendid_ zero-click info, including a thumbnail of the Lady of Elche; "Y-haplogroup R1b" and "mtDNA haplogroup H" also worked very well; but "Iberian race" turned up zero-click info that's been refuted completely by genetic genealogy and was pseudoscience even before then.

Of course, there's an element of "garbage in, garbage out" here. I would hardly condemn a merely _mortal_ search engine for being less than up-to-date on the very young (<30 years) and distinctly arcane fields of forensic anthropology and genetic genealogy -- but Zero-Click Info mode makes it sound like this is _your_ information, not _the Internet's_ information.

Perhaps you could add a disclaimer to the effect that your elite team of ninja ducks has scoured the dark corners of the earth and returned with the best information they could find, but there's still a risk that their findings are a complete load of HealthBase?

(I would also _love_ to see a picture of your elite team of ninja ducks returning from their investigations. But maybe that's just a sign that I'm easily amused -- the kind of person who _still_ finds "All Your Base" to be funny...)

Very cool. I've been using it for a while, and DDG's Zero-click Info results is like asking the smartest guy in the office: "Hey Bob, what is [INSERT SEARCH TERM HERE]?", and having them respond with a relevant, informed, & concise answer.

This is very similar to Powerset (http://powerset.com). They were bought by Microsoft a while back for a fair chunk of change, so you might be on to something.

I switched to DDG to try it out - and have been using it very often since.

Too bad you don't see the text you are typing in if you're using a dark gnome theme (the background of the input box is black, and the text is set to dark grey). On google it's ok (white text).

The same thing happens here on HN comments, btw. :)

I really dig duck duck go, its possibly the greatest google competitor on the net (in my opinion) I love the ajax populated results when you scroll, and the results are usually pretty relevant. If I have any complaints, its that some of the graphics seem less than professional. Anyways, while I've been watching it for a while this feature encouraged me to make it my default search engine in chrome.

Thx! Any particular UI suggestions? I've been thinking lately of offering some settings to change font sizes/faces/colors/etc. Would that help?

you know the duck is cute, i don't ever go to the front page.. but those graphics are pretty good too. I think a better looking search button (sorry I have no suggestions... i'm a programmer, not an artist) and maybe the option for me to decrease the font size. Its still going to be my default even without the changes though, so don't spend to much time on it :)

The box is too small for the wikipedia content, and the fact that it's from wikipedia is a selling point and should be advertised.

I've always found the whole page to be too low-contrast for quick skimming, but it could just be my acclimation to Google.

Hey, I'd love your site, a lot of my friends have started using it regularly over Google.

As for UI suggestions, I know you're trying to keep it cute, but I'd try to use a little more serious design. I think a lot of people might miss the high quality of the results. Even if you decided to keep the theme, I'd change the Century Gothic font. I've been using a custom made stylesheet to modify that thus far :P

What's in your stylesheet?

Does the same thing as Googlepedia does for Firefox. What impresses me more is the "Try search on" box on the right. It would be nice if that were customizable.

Thx! Googlepedia displays whole articles next to search results (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/images/p/6210/) and not relevant paragraphs.

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