Author: Ashish Datta

Ashish graduated from Tufts University with a BS in computer science. Prior to Setfive Consulting, he worked at ArmchairGM and later Wikia. He has a disposition for single malt scotch and believes drinking on patios constitutes “being outdoorsy”. Connect with him on Quora, LinkedIn, or Google+

Yahoo BOSS is sahweet!

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Yahoo BOSS is sahweet!

A couple of weeks ago I ran across this article on Techcrunch.

Basically, a Yahoo! engineer used Yahoo Boss! and the Google App engine to make a “who,what,where,when” answering service. Since I want one I took a look at the code, but since its on the GAE the code is in Python for the GAE.

Anyway, since its like 50 lines of code I decided to take a look at BOSS and port it over to PHP. The quick and dirty PHP clocks in at 200 lines and is available for testing. The PHP returns JSON code with an optional callback specified with c=

Feel free to use it for whatever – just play nice

It might even make it into a super secret Wikia framework!

Code is available here.

Vik does a really good job of explaining how the process works. Unfortunately, its not particularly consistent or accurate. But it is pretty neat and considering its only 200 lines a good demonstration of thinking outside the box.

JS+GNU Plot = ?

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on JS+GNU Plot = ?

I was playing around with Microsoft’s Live search the other day and found out that it can actually solve higher order quadratics! http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=x^3%2B4*x%3D25&go=&form=QBRE

Anyway, that’s cool and all but I really wanted it to make graphs when I searched for functions. I poked around a little but it doesn’t look like there is any way to plug stuff like that into Live! Luckily for me, Wikia Search is testing / developing their widget framework – codename WISE.

I threw together this WISE widget – http://fp029.sjc.wikia-inc.com/search/search.html#f(x)=x^3+3*x+5

The widget is really just a front end to GNU Plot – http://www.gnuplot.info/

A JS front end is here http://code.setfive.com/gnuplot-ui/ui.html

Launched Wikia Evolution!

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Launched Wikia Evolution!

So I spent the summer working over at Wikia Inc as an engineer on their search project – http://re.search.wikia.com

Last month I wrote a Firefox 3.0 extension which launched yesterday – https://addons.update.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8267

From the official Wikia blog:

One of our core values at Wikia Search is Community. We want everyone to be able to participate in the Wikia Search project. That’s why we are proud to introduce Wikia Evolution, our new Firefox toolbar. You can download it here, or via Mozilla’s Firefox Add-On Library.

The mission of Wikia Evolution: To empower users to interact with search.

We want to make it dead-simple for you to add URLs into our index under appropriate keywords. Already, we’re the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating user feedback into our search results, so much so that Google is experimenting with eerily similar features. Wikia Evolution pushes the envelope even further. It allows you to quickly and easily add the web page you are on into Wikia Search, directly from your browser, for whatever keyword is appropriate. Instant indexing! Then, you can modify the search result to make it really killer, all without leaving the page you’re on.

The release was even covered by Techcrunch!

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/wikia-evolution-to-help-suck-search-data-from-google-yahoo/

Like everything at Wikia, the toolbar is open source. A public SVN is up at http://people.swlabs.org/~bartek/websvn/listing.php?repname=SearchUI&path=%2Fcool%2Ftoolbar%2F and you can download the code from the Mozilla add-ons site.