Similpedia - The Blog

Similpedia's brand new Widget!

2007-10-05T21:07:00.000-04:00

Our Website Tool has been officially named Similpedia Widget.
It's got a new clean look and a very customizable user interface. Check it out at our Similpedia Tools page.
Simply by copying and pasting the provided code onto your HTML page's you can give your readers a new perspective and lots of "references" on the topic. Similpedia will deliver the most relevant and similar articles currently present in Wikipedia. No user action is re required.

How relevant are the results? Well, here is an updated DEMO. We believe they're pretty good - if you do not believe us, give it a try yourself - it's free!

While not blogging for awhile we've been busy updating and reinforcing our backend system for faster and better content processing.

We've got big things in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

--

Similpedia Tools

2007-08-13T09:50:00.000-04:00

... and I am back after a really busy weekend!
Let's go ahead and discuss what Tools we've made available to both web surfers and bloggers (or anyone who publishes content on the web).

1. Website Tool - Blogger/Publisher Tool
Probably this is a misnomer, but this tool can be used for any website regardless of the underlying blogging/publishing platform. The tool consists of a single line of HTML code (which actually calls a JavaScript file) and allows you to automatically add relevant Wikipedia content on your site.
Simply copy one of the code snippets in the Similpedia Tools page - depending on how many links you would like to list - and paste it on your page exactly where you want the content titles to be displayed. Here is a Live Demo of this tool in action.
Advanced users: If you'd like to style the widget, the ul element's class is similpedia-items and the li elements' class is similpedia-item (notice the "s" or lack of at the end)

2. Wordpress Widget
You MUST use a widgets-enabled theme. The widget is very similar to the default Wordpress RSS widget. There are three steps to getting this widget up and running:
1. Upload filename.php to either /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ or /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the Similario widget through the "Plugins" menu in your WordPress installation.
3. Add the Similario widget to your sidebar: "Presentation" => "Sidebar Widgets".

3. Firefox Add-on
The Firefox Add-on enables you to use Similpedia three ways:
- by selecting your text of choice, right-clicking and selecting "Find Similar".
- drag-and-drop the Similpedia button in your Firefox's Navigator Toolbar and you can select any block of text and then click on the button for Wikipedia results
- Lastly, when visiting any site, you can directly click the Similpedia button to find Wikipedia articles similar to the website you are currently visiting.

4. Firefox Bookmarklet
Make sure the "Bookmarks Toolbar" is checked in your Firefox installation. Check under View -> Toolbars. Drag the bookmarklet link into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
When visiting any website you can do either of the following:
- Simply click the Similpedia Bookmarklet to view articles similar to the whole document OR
- Select a block of text and click the Bookmarklet to view articles similar to that text only.

5. Contextual RSS - cRSS(tm)
IF you would like Similpedia content delivered to you in RSS format you can freely embed RSS in your existing RSS widget or anywhere in any project of yours (mobile etc).
Our Contextual RSS cRSS(tm) feed allows for flexibility and can be accessed using the following API:
http://www.similpedia.org/crss?q=url_here
For example, the link below will deliver as an RSS feed Wikipedia articles that are similar in content to a Yahoo article titled: "Oil Settles Above $70 a Barrel" located at:
http://www.similpedia.org/crss?q=http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070629/oil_prices.html
The Yahoo article is located at: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070629/oil_prices.html

I hope this has been informative to you and I certainly hope you find the tools useful.
--

How does Similpedia work?

2007-08-10T13:11:00.001-04:00

The technology. Ah, don't we all love it?!
The truth is that there is a lot of math and algorithms behind the curtains and we believe that the current version of Similpedia.org engine is pretty good at what it does. However, we really think there is a lot of room for improvement.
Right now, the Similpedia back-end is running on a single commodity machine with a single 3.4 Ghz P4 processor and with about 4GB RAM. It is, of course, powered by open source software; Linux, MySQL, Apache (Tomcat) and Java as well as a host of other homemade "secret algorithmic" and advanced math ingredients - which if we would tell you we'd have to kill you - i am joking :)

Our Codemaister Guru, Ledion Bitincka, has done a great job at tuning up and streamlining the "secret" algorithms so much that they are able to chew up, that is, process and make ready to query, the entire English Wikipedia corpus ( all 1.8M articles of it) in less than 40minutes! Impressive, isn't it?

How can Similpedia be useful to me?
Well, it depends who you are, what you do and what your name is. Just kidding about that last part!

If you are a web surfer and would like to get additional Wikipedia information regarding a topic or an article that you are reading, you can just query Similpedia with that entire text block. There is plenty of additional information that Wikipedia can provide for most topics ever written

If your are a website owner (read webmaster, blogger, publisher etc) you can use Similpedia Tools to automatically add Wikipedia article titles in your site. This way you enhance readability as well as complement your writings with Wikipedia "references". In fact, we provide a whole set of Similpedia Tools for such tasks.

Stay tuned for a Tools post.
--

What is Similpedia.org?

2007-08-10T12:31:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to find content in Wikipedia that is similar and relevant to a block of text (i.e. paragraph), an article or even an entire web page?

... enter Similpedia.org

Insert a paragraph or URL in the query field and you will be delivered a list of Wikipedia article titles that are similar in content to what you're looking for.

The name. What's up with the name?
Well, (in case you haven't noticed already) it is a mixture of Similar and Wikipedia. We think it sounds cool ... and ... could not think of anything better - any refreshing ideas?
--

Similpedia.org - Introduction

2007-08-10T00:08:00.000-04:00

Hello World!

Welcome to the newly created Similpedia.org - The Blog!

This will be our place to discuss our updates to Similpedia.org.
The Blog will interface us with the blogosphere and enable us to detail all Similpedia related news, tools and feature additions.

Stay with us & stay tuned for more!
--