Wundrbar is the next generation of search (YC Winter 08) | Hacker News Reader

Wundrbar is the next generation of search (YC Winter 08)

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48 pointsgarbowza24 comments

One thing people don't want to do is have to memorize a syntax just to use a search engine. A lot of people have trouble with Google as it is. I realize that the idea is to augment traditional search engines' capabilities (so that people will have less trouble), but it's going to have to be easy for non-hackers to catch on to it. The learning curve has to be shallow or the average user is going to give up on it. That being said I really like the way it tells you what it thinks you mean as you type though, and definitely think there is potential for this type of thing.

yes! we've built wundrbar to be intuitive, precisely because it's annoying to need a man page every time we use a new command. wundrbar aims to capture the power and simplicity of a traditional command line (including the ability script and pipe) and to throw in some magic dust so that you don't have to remember the exact command name or what order the parameters come in.

for example, imagine sending money with paypal from the traditional command line. there are two pieces of information, a number (amount of money) and an email. well, in a traditional command, you would have to enter those parameters in a fixed order, or add a flag so the command read 'paypal -to joe@example.com -amount 5'. but really, a number and an email look quite different, and the command should be able to figure out which is which, right? that's what wundrbar does. so 'paypal joe@example.com 5' or 'paypal 5 joe@example.com', both are good.

Is it just me that sees Wonder Bra as the name though?

Its a clever pun on the German word for wonderful.

Well a pun anyway, yeah I got it.

Overall, nice work. It seems to have a lot of potential! It would be cool to be able to use wundrbar in a linux terminal and pipe the results to a Conky (http://conky.sourceforge.net/) window :)

If in doubt about structuring the query, I find its much easier to start by typing in the service name and following up with parameters specified in the feedback box.

This could be very cool.

I am trying out the firefox search box (http://www.wundrbar.com/static/extras). The default search is still google so I lose nothing and potentially gain a lot. Bring on the plugins!

The search box version doesn't show the previews, but the Firefox toolbar does the trick!

"... Wundrbar is the next generation of search ..."

lost me at "enter your twitter username & password". certainly don't need to do this with google, icerocket, yahoo, altavista.

what exactly do you mean - why does that lose you? because it's asking for personal information? for google calendar, wundrbar takes you to google for authentication, and then gets back a token from google and stores that. but not all services operate that way. if you want to use a personal account through wundrbar, though, it need to have some way of authenticating as you with that external service. the benefit is that you can access multiple personal accounts from one place, and that soon you will be able to access them by sending a text message, for example.

"... what exactly do you mean - why does that lose you? because it's asking for personal information? ..."

Hi ngrandy. Pretty much. Here's why:

- To extract information from twitter doesn't require my username + password

- Third party sites that extract usernames + passwd information expose "users" to unnecessary risk of exposing their login details

- From a development point of view using the API is not necessary if you balance the risks of user details compared to product features

The reason I bring this particular point up is that I think this product is very useful & dearly would love it to succeed. But the first time I use a suggested example (eg: 'twitter bootload today') I'm required to sign over my account details. Why? You can get my latest information via RSS without having to get twitter account details.

As a new company you have to listen to what users want and balance what you can offer them and what they need. In effect weighing up the risks of giving them power at the expense of exposing them to harm. For me the risk of handing over my details to simply search for them is not worth it. FriendFeed appears to achieve this balance using RSS, why not other companies? Some observations:

- no SSL evident on twit account gathering (that I can see) so that username + passwd is plain-text

- are twitter account details stored on a third party machine (how is it encrypted?)

- how secure are the details being sent by third parties?

I've looked at the current twitter best practice on third-party sites asking users for personal details for authentication. The result is it appears twitter does not endorse this approach and as far as I can tell until OAuth is offered [0] there is no real secure way. So why offer it? So I'll go one step further and get an official twitter response to the best practice for third party developers using the twitter API and user account info. You can follow here [1].

My twitter account is my personal information channel akin to my phone account. I don't hand it over to anyone easily. Asking these types of questions about user details & security is making a personal statement about yourself.

[0] http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/brow...

[1] http://getsatisfaction.com/people/bootload

hey bootload, thanks for your detailed response. you raise a lot of good points. we've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

first, you're right that just extracting info from twitter doesn't require username and password. our initial twitter interface is an update though, which does require authentication.

- we do use SSL for all usernames / passwords that are submitted, though we should make that clear, b/c right now we don't give an indication.

- because twitter does not offer token-based authentication, and because we do not currently want to store passwords, we are actually submitting to twitter via the web interface; that means we submit the u+p just once, and then we hold onto a cookie, but not the u+p. when we login to twitter on your behalf, it is via https.

- one goal in the near / mid term is to give users a choice about the combination of privacy / convenience that they want. right now we have opted on the side of privacy, since we're not storing usernames and passwords. but some users have told us they would like wundrbar to basically act as a password manager, so we'll be building in that option.

- i hope twitter (and other sites) implement open auth soon, because i know there are alot of users who will be more comfortable using wundrbar through that authentication mechanism.

"... hey bootload, thanks for your detailed response. you raise a lot of good points. we've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about these issues. ..."

hey ngrandy, sorry for the delay in getting back to you and thanks for explaining your setup. It reads like a well considered approach ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2348875304/

Looks great. Personally I love yubnub but I don't think they've taken the idea very far - lets hope wundrbar does. Yubnub has user added scripts which is an advantage though.

Wundrbar's site says they're a platform and soon hackers will be able to plugin services into the system to be used by anyone. I think we'll see some awesomely clever uses of Wundrbar as its community starts to grow.

That'll be great. One thing I've noticed about yubnub is that I don't have to think about listing the commands because you know most search engines will be in there and the alias easily guessable. Yubnub does basically stop at forming search queries though.

For those who like these kind of very narrow searches, there is "Surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web"[1].

[1] - http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org

i think it would be a good idea to push what functionality is available on the main page; i trolled through what might be there by doing "a" backspace, "b", backspace, "c". also, more than half of the "sample commands" i handle as keyword searches in FF or as prefix: to google: i think those could be more compelling.

also, minor bug report: "bestbuy ipod" redirected me to a page on bestbuy.com that was empty.

neat implementation though, looking forward to seeing further iterations.

thanks for the comments. we agree we need more and better ways to showcase the kinds of things that are possible, and we're working on those. also fixed bestbuy, will be deployed soon.

Which is the best place to get started with computational semantics ?Wundrbar seem to interpret search queries very efficiently.

There are a ton of different ways to approach the problem of interpreting a command. if you're interested in a solid reference for computational linguistics, then i recommend either 'speech and language processing' by jurafsky et al or the 'oxford handbook of computational linguistics'. finally, the forthcoming information retrieval book (http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-...) is a fantastic resource.

however, keep in mind that a lot of the stuff in these books has been used more at the academic level than in commercial applications. we at wundrbar are being very careful not to bite off more than we can chew. many companies have tried and failed to tackle natural language processing, and we are NOT doing that; we feel like we can add a lot of value without trying to do anything too fancy. our commands right now are identified by keywords located at the start of the command - simple, intuitive, reliable.

It would be cool to have this integrated into Firefox's address bar (I know the wikipedia trick already is).

Aneesh, if you install the wundrbar toolbar for firefox you can actually replace the location bar with wundrbar! It's a big leap, but it's there as an option. Or you can just use the toolbar, which automatically positions itself below the location bar.

Right click on the wundrbar search box and select 'add a keyword for this search'. Then you can just type 'keyword' <blah> in the firefox address bar.

Edit: This doesn't work with wundrbar for some reason.

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