But tl;dr many students have been accused of using AI by teachers who think that AI detection software works, when it really doesn't. So the goal of this site is to communicate to teachers that AI detection software isn't reliable.
I've been working on a manual version of this for many months now [0]. I read books of historical figures, then create fictional but accurate conversations with them based on the books. And I always include full citations so people know it's accurate.
I think releasing a purely AI version of this is not feasible at the moment, because of the obvious issue of hallucinations. It's not an educational product if it's giving people false information. In fact, it's actively harmful. And it's sad that people are trying to cash in on the AI hype without any regard for the accuracy of their content.
My understanding is that the early days of blogging were mostly people sharing personal things, and now that has moved to social media.
A lot of the online writing happening now is essays on some topic, or people trying to share notes on things they learn. And I think this type of writing is more conducive to a project like this.
The simple and unfortunate explanation is that the index is just not that big right now (only 900 blogs).
Working on increasing it significantly, but will take some time. Try it again in a month and you may find it more useful. Right now it's mostly filled with tech, business, and politics.
Only 900 blogs are currently indexed, and they're mostly tech, business or politics, so I wouldn't be surprised if none of them have written about the will smith situation.
I am working on increasing the amount of blogs significantly, but please bear with my modest index in the meantime.
> changing a search phrase or word and doing a new search, I notice the results do change, but there's no way to know if it really happened. Changing a Google search, the whole page flashes empty, that way I see/sense there's something new. In your case, a change is subtle, very subtle, too subtle. In one instance I had to look carefully to see the change in results.
That is a good point. I did try to remove any loading indicators because I thought it would be smoother, but maybe it's a bit too smooth for people to realize their search went through. Will think more on how to fix this.
It's called a metasearch engine [0]. There was a project launched 2 years ago called Runnaroo [1] that kind of did this, but they aren't online anymore.
I think most of us in this space are willing to collaborate so something interesting could happen.
This is not a business, and I would like to open source it, but it would probably be better for everyone if I wait until I clean up my garbage code, which will take some time.
> Tbh I'll probably use the random bit more than search
That's interesting to hear, and fits well with the goals of the site. I want it to be more of a "discovery engine" than a "search engine". Search is one path to discovery, random posts are another, there are probably more.
One thing I'm thinking of adding is the ability to easily see the blog posts that any given post links to. If you see an interesting post, you could pull up everything that may be related.
> definitely going to keep checking back to pad my RSS feeds with interesting content.
Sadly not every blog has RSS, and many RSS feeds are incomplete. Another thing I would like to build is auto-generated RSS feeds for all blogs, which would also make it easy for people to programmatically parse any blog and do interesting things.
> This is definitely very cool as I've been looking for something like this since technorati (which was originally a blog search engine).
Technorati was one of the inspirations here so that's great to hear.
> Would love to hear details about how you created the database, the infrastructure, etc if it's not a trade secret. Kudos on the launch!
Sure, it's actually fairly simple! The search backend itself is running on Typesense [0], which was very quick and easy to setup.
Due to the way ranking is calculated, I can actually avoid doing any real web crawling (though, I may add that in soon to help increase the index size). Ranking is based on submission to online communities, so all I really need is those submissions.
Using the Reddit, HN and Twitter APIs, I search for any submissions related to any blogs in the database, then those submissions give me the post URLs.
Once I have the post URLs, I just need to request those specific URLs to get the post data.
Then there's scripts for things like content extraction, inflation calculation, currency conversion etc.
All of those scripts are in python.
The frontend is a simple React app built with Next. All pages are statically generated.
But tl;dr many students have been accused of using AI by teachers who think that AI detection software works, when it really doesn't. So the goal of this site is to communicate to teachers that AI detection software isn't reliable.
I originally discovered this in a reddit comment which you can see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/13hi5y6/comment/jk...