So I had some time (not really Daum just couldn’t get me to do any real work) so I wrote up a thin wrapper around Yahoo BOSS.
The code is available here
I mashed it into the where/what/when thing and made a swag front end ;)
The only search class implimented is the web one. I’ll probably try and do news/image later this weekend. I also haven’t tested ANY of the features so it’s very possible nothing works.
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.
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