{"id":322,"date":"2013-11-14T12:30:32","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T20:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/?p=322"},"modified":"2014-02-09T09:00:16","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T17:00:16","slug":"the-newish-wikipedia-regex-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2013\/11\/14\/the-newish-wikipedia-regex-search\/","title":{"rendered":"The newish Wikipedia Regex Search"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve had the <a href=\"http:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/wiki\/\">Wikipedia Regex Search<\/a> live for a while at Crossword Nexus, and this past week we made a few changes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The search is much, much faster now. It is also easier on our servers, so making that change was win-win.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve removed the Wiktionary search. The ranking algorithm we have for Wikipedia works great, but not so much for Wiktionary. We&#8217;ll need a new way of ranking common words &#8230; any suggestions?<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve removed the word length limit option and restricted results somewhat. We want to encourage people to download the list and run their searches offline if they want more.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now if you&#8217;re wondering why you should use this thing, let me give you a concrete example of why it&#8217;s better than OneLook. Let&#8217;s use it to solve <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2013\/11\/10\/244011816\/capitalize-on-this-minus-that\">the most recent NPR Sunday Puzzle<\/a> &#8230;<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There is a politician today, sometimes known by his or her full three-word name, whose initials are also the initials of a popular chain of restaurants. Who is the politician and what&#8217;s the restaurant?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you&#8217;re like me, you very quickly came up with Hillary Rodham Clinton as the politician. Let&#8217;s face it, there just aren&#8217;t that many nationally known politicians period, much less ones that go by three-word names. But I couldn&#8217;t come up with the restaurant chain, so I asked OneLook &#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook1.png\" alt=\"onelook\" width=\"753\" height=\"354\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-328\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook1.png 753w, https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook1-300x141.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 753px) 100vw, 753px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nOMG over 300 entries I&#8217;m not going to sort through all that.  Onelook thankfully has a &#8220;common words and phrases&#8221; restriction, let&#8217;s see what that gives us &#8230;<a href=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook2.png\" alt=\"onelook2\" width=\"679\" height=\"406\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-325\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook2.png 679w, https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/onelook2-300x179.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 679px) 100vw, 679px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nWell, that&#8217;s less than helpful.  How about on Crossword Nexus?  <a href=\"http:\/\/crosswordnexus.com\/wiki\/index.php?regex=h*+r*+c*&#038;searchtype=simple\">What do we get there?<\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/xn.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/xn.png\" alt=\"xn\" width=\"321\" height=\"481\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-326\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/xn.png 321w, https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/xn-200x300.png 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 321px) 100vw, 321px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nWell, that&#8217;s better.  Ordering the results the way we do is <strong>much<\/strong> better than a simple alphabetical ordering.  And 20 results is plenty when the thing you&#8217;re looking for is in the top 5.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, feel free to use this thing.  And if you find anything cool with it, I would love to hear about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve had the Wikipedia Regex Search live for a while at Crossword Nexus, and this past week we made a few changes: The search is much, much faster now. It is also easier on our servers, so making that change &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2013\/11\/14\/the-newish-wikipedia-regex-search\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puzzles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":344,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}