Show HN: Open Source Search Engine to Learn Anything | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open Source Search Engine to Learn Anything

learn-anything.xyz

145 pointsnikivi16 comments

This is a brilliant idea and I love the minimal design. I was most inspired when I found that all the data is easily accessible through GitHub. I think the most important missing piece right now is authentication - if you implemented GitHub OAuth you could make it much easier for people to make contributions and record their progress without having to roll out your own authentication. You could also potentially save a user's progress and custom mind maps in a gist, eliminating the need to even have your own database.

I checked out the roadmap (https://learn-anything.github.io/2017/06/15/roadmap.html) and your comment below about a visual editor, and am now so excited to see where this project goes and hope to find ways I can contribute to it!

Thank you a lot for the kind comment.

Our next update is focused on authentication and 'personalising' the search engine as much as possible. Some features we plan to add are :

- Ability to bookmark maps

- Ability to mark maps as learned

- Ability to see a progress bar of how many maps you have learned compared to how many maps there exist

- Ability to create and share learning paths with other people. A learning path is a collection of maps that can be followed to achieve some goal or skill like becoming a web developer.

- We also want to create APIs that other developers can use to build their own visualisations and use our search and our public database in their own projects

- We also want to add ability to trigger nodes as learned and ability to hide nodes you dislike or have learned

- We also plan to add a text editor that is tied to your account so users can make notes on various topics they have learned or discovered

Our goal with this is to make it a completely personal search engine for learning any topic in this world in the most efficient way. Everything is open source too so if anyone wants to fork it and create their own search engine, they can.

If you want to help us with this, please do. We have an active Slack channel we use for all our communication.

https://knowledge-map.slack.com/shared_invite/MTgxNTYzMjIzNj...

There are also lots of open issues on our search engine we can certainly wish to get help with :

https://github.com/learn-anything/search-engine/issues

This is great, thanks for building. Leaving for work but really deeply truly can't wait to play around with this tonight.

The idea is great, the results seem a little minimal so far, "Mandarin Chinese" produced one result, "Arduino" was a bit better, "knot tying" was a null result. There's a lot of info on contributing which is great, but the process is not what I'd call easy - I'd think especially on searches that return nil it'd be good to throw up some kind of form, and ask the user if they wouldn't mind clicking through to the DDG results, looking at a few of the top hits, and then pasting in what they found to be the most helpful?

The idea is that each map is open for contributions so all maps can be improved with the help of the community. Right now new things can be added by adding things directly to the JSON code that generates these maps but soon we will have a visual editor to simply this process even further.

And we provide a fallback search to DuckDuckGo in cases where no map is found for what you are searching for. We are also thinking of releasing a browser extension that will do what you proposed. You collect links from outside and then come back to our search engine and help improve it.

Both of those approaches sound very much easier for people to make submissions, good to hear.

The idea is that each map is open for contributions so all maps can be improved with the help of the community. Right now new things can be added by adding things directly to...

Like DMOZ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

I really dig this website. When I want to learn a new topic my first step is always to discover the scope of the topic and find sources so this site is a real help.

Pro-tip: type in 'everything'

I have to say that the UI confused me for a moment. The fact that what I searched didn't stay in the search box, and instead it replaced it with a new suggested search term was confusing.

Sorry you found this confusing. We show suggestions in greyed out text to encourage new searches for new things you can learn about.

The goal of this search engine is to let users both explore and search for what they need, not just search like what you can do with conventional search engines.

I think it's just a matter of the dominant elements on the page. The thing you searched is in small text beneath the very large search bar so it takes a moment to figure out what is going on. Otherwise very cool, good work!

Is that backed up by anything regarding information retrieval ergonomics, or is it just a "hey lets try this" design decision?

Awesome tool, Nikita! This is a great step into organized, open knowledge.

Can't see the map in MS Edge.

Sorry about this. This is an open issue still, sadly no one for our team has MS edge to test it on.

There is a pending issue on the search engine for this :

https://github.com/learn-anything/search-engine/issues/54

We certainly would love some help on this from people who own MS Edge and can help test it there.

You can use https://www.browserstack.com/ or VM with edge to test it https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v... :)

edit: edge testing is free in browserstack

Reply on news.ycombinator.com