Blending Google and the old Yahoo!

JavaScript
PHP
SQL
Backstory

This project arose from a common frustration of mine of having the world's knowledge at my fingertips, yet still not being able to find what I want.

Geeky Stuff

I know what you have to say: "Just use faceted search". I am aware this exists, but faceted search implies you know what you want and what parameters to use. Also, it does not achieve the aim of the project. If you are exploring a new area and are using the Internet to do so, chances are you will have no clue of what the facets could even be.

The solution proposed does not assume any knowledge from the user. It just structures and/or generates new key-words. The derived value is being able to visualise how information is correlated according to the Internet's knowledge base.

How you can run this

It’d be easier if you contacted me if you really wanted to run this. Nonetheless, the code is available so, if time was not a constraint for you, you could make it work yourself.

How to use the program

You can type words that come to mind and the engine will show how they relate to each other. When inspiration is the problem, use the words you already have in your diagram to generate new ones to put in, using the autocomplete feature.

Thoughts

This project was great fun, I just thought it was strange Google didn't do something similar to this. Playing around with the different possible inputs it was interesting to see the bias behind certain correlations, just sayin' Google, this would make a nice doodle

Acknowledgements
  1. Programmatic Internet Search - Copyright © 2019 Google https://cse.google.com/cse/all
  2. Autocomplete Suggestions - Copyright © 2019 Google http://suggestqueries.google.com
  3. Network Diagram - Copyright © 2010-2018 Almende B.V. and Contributors https://github.com/visjs/vis-network
  4. Cross Origin Sharing - Copyright © 2013 - 2016 Rob Wu rob@robwu.nl
  5. CSS effects - Zach Saucier, https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Disintegrate