What do you get if you cross a search engine with an encyclopedia?

November 7, 2005 8:38 AM

Factbites is a new approach to web searching - the results make sense! Factbites offers users meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results. For example, durian.
posted by crunchland (19 comments total)

Meaningful, maybe... not so relevant. When I search for brutalism in google, I get a number of relevant sites about architecture. The same search in factbites, I get lots of pages about police brutality. Because apparently I searched for the word "brutality" anyway.
posted by setanor at 8:42 AM on November 7, 2005

Well, I know it means slightly more typing, but how about trying factbites for brutalist architecture?
posted by crunchland at 8:44 AM on November 7, 2005

Much nicer. I certainly would have had no issue with the extra word if I would have known ahead of time that it was necessary to be that specific.
posted by setanor at 8:46 AM on November 7, 2005

Hmmm...I'll have to wait until I get home. Websense thinks this is an inappropriate site (Games).
posted by kozad at 8:53 AM on November 7, 2005

Oh man... I was at a party once where they served up a Durian. The entire apartment smelled like dirty socks for hours. "King of Fruits" or "King of Monsters"?
posted by ducksauce at 9:01 AM on November 7, 2005

Let's see... Wikipedia, Wikipedia mirror, Uncyclopedia, Wikipedia mirror. Great start!

I love the Uncyclopedia entry!
posted by Plutor at 9:01 AM on November 7, 2005

"What do you get if you cross a search engine with an encyclopedia?"

something that doesn't do either very well... :-
results on this were pretty useless for the few random searches I did...
posted by HuronBob at 9:11 AM on November 7, 2005

Interesting, but I would have thought the smell factor of durian would have made it to the top of that list. Perhaps they could scan the dfferent sentences and count word occurances, to up the "ranking" of some sentences.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:22 AM on November 7, 2005

oh crap... the Uncyclopedia... you can edit it without an account...

I see bad things ahead for the metafilter entry posted above..

have fun kiddies!
posted by HuronBob at 9:40 AM on November 7, 2005

Wow, it seems to work pretty well.
posted by delmoi at 9:56 AM on November 7, 2005

it automatically "corrects" your search. google dropped that "feature" years ago.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:23 AM on November 7, 2005

I certainly would have had no issue with the extra word if I would have known ahead of time that it was necessary to be that specific.

Hmm.... seems to me that what you think of as bad, most other people would think of as good. You seem to want the engine to report obscure and counter-intuitive results (I'm a pretty well-educated guy, and this is the first I've ever heard of "brutalism" as an architectural movement) in preference to mainstream or intuitive results ("brutalism" in a common usage would refer to a personal philosophy that leat to -- well -- brutalizing, e.g., police brutality).
posted by lodurr at 10:47 AM on November 7, 2005

Hey, I found my company's website just by entering its name into the search box!

Its an interesting concept but I couldn't get anything useful to come out of it. I searched "spray house" (which results in many useful hits on grancrete housing and other interesting alternative housing concepts via Google) and the first three result were: Butterfly houses, some random blog that mentions the word house and a Dustmite and Flea Control spray commercial site.

Interesting but not especially useful to me yet.
posted by fenriq at 11:24 AM on November 7, 2005

Since I don't get a chance to discuss the durian fruit much, I should add that "rotten garlicky mango" would be a good description of its smell, although the intensity of the smell is beyond belief. Eat it outside, if you must, and for those who insist, "It tastes better than it smells." I would say: just barely. This extreme example, of a delicacy is some lands that is unbearable in others, makes ya wonder, don't it?
posted by kozad at 11:42 AM on November 7, 2005

This clearly proves that George Bush might actually be descended from apes and the Democraps are God's gift to social security
posted by illovich at 12:16 PM on November 7, 2005

Hmm.... seems to me that what you think of as bad, most other people would think of as good. You seem to want the engine to report obscure and counter-intuitive results (I'm a pretty well-educated guy, and this is the first I've ever heard of "brutalism" as an architectural movement) in preference to mainstream or intuitive results ("brutalism" in a common usage would refer to a personal philosophy that leat to -- well -- brutalizing, e.g., police brutality).

Brutalism is way more commonly used to describe the architectural style than a philosophy of violent behaviour. And there is no reason the search engine should change a search for brutalism into a search for brutality.
posted by lazy-ville at 12:23 PM on November 7, 2005

I agree. Their correction algorithm needs work.
posted by crunchland at 12:25 PM on November 7, 2005

Gah. It just gives up on a bunch of topics, making it a lot more like an encyclopedia and a lot less like a search engine.
posted by zanni at 1:26 PM on November 7, 2005

So, durian is the king because it's stinky and mangosteen is the queen because it... stains, right? Or did I miss the genitalia last time I looked?
posted by arcticwoman at 4:08 PM on November 7, 2005