How does Similpedia work?

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.
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