Sanity's Journal: A WhittleBit of extra intelligence

After a long delay I finally have a reasonably reliable implementation of my "learning" web search engine up at WhittleBit.com.

Yeah - weird name, I know. All other comments welcome.

Addendum 8/1/03: Sorry for those that tried this and found it to be down - the problem was that I use a Java daemon to do the donkey-work but I couldn't find a VM that would run on the server I was using (which has a weird setup). Finally I got it working using Kaffe - hopefully it will prove to be stable.

How smart is it?

[Zagar]

How smart is WhittleBit? Can it learn from the users feedback? Say I search for 555 timer, I would put a possitive feedback on the description pages of the chip and put a negative feedback on the catalogs. Now, say I search for 2N3904, what are the odds that WhittleBit will give me information on that transistor or will it simply act stupid and give me links to transistor catalogs?

Can you tell us more about the alogrithms you used? Is it immune to the blog effect (ie: Second super power)?

Re:How smart is it?

[Sanity]

It is hard to say how it will perform in this circumstance - but it will do its best so make use of the information you give it. In the caseyou outline, it should be smart enough to make the distinction - but you should try it yourself to find out.