H-Bot, the history bot...

I just found a nice service using the Google WEB API. It is called H-Bot. Here is what Dan Cohen, posted to Google Groups:

We've just launched a beta version of an application that uses the
Google API in combination with other resources to answer historical
questions like "When did Charles Lindbergh fly to Paris?" "When was
Nelson Mandela born?" "What was the gold standard?" "Who was Lao-Tse?"
We are still developing and testing the application, called H-Bot, and
are very interested in receiving some preliminary feedback before
doing a more official launch to students and teachers.

You can try H-Bot out on the web at http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/h-bot/
or via an AOL instant messenger client by adding a buddy with the AIM
screen name "chnmhbot". If you type in "help" it will give you some
tips on using it. Also, if H-Bot gives you an incorrect answer, you
can type "wrong" and it will automatically log the error so we can try
to fine tune our programming.

Thanks in advance for the feedback of anyone who might be interested.

Dan Cohen
Director of Research Projects
Center for History and New Media
George Mason University


Nice idea!

Bye bye Athens Olympics....

The Athens Olympics are over... It was fun for us Greeks, I hope the rest of the world enjoyed them as much as we did (it looks like you did!). I think Athens was proud to have all you athletes, visitors, journalists, tourists here for some days, and... we will miss you!

Here is how g-metrics reported on "olympics". It will be interesting to see how the graph goes in the next 4 years!

Ideas for new g-metrics features

I'm working on the new version of g-metrics.com. The backend is being rewritten almost from scratch and the user interface will be much more clean and easy to use.

Here are some new features I have in mind to implement:
- "orphan queries". After a couple of months of operation there are queries that have been eitrher entered by mistake or are of no interest any more and they no user has them in his watchlist. There will be a list of the "orphan queries" that (unless someone adds them to his watchlist) they will be deleted after some time.
- top 10 results. The query details page will show the top 10 results returned by google (and will probably include a link directly to the google results page.
- edit profile. Registered users will be able to edit their profile (email, name, opt-in for newsletter).
- rss feeds. There will be a link to the individual rss feed at the query details page.
- new query initialization. when a new query is added to the system, google will be imediately polled (now you may wait up to 24 hours to see the firs results).

Any other ideas? I can't promise anything, but I'll try... :-)

(some of you asked for virtual folders so that a long watchlist can be organized better, but this will have to wait for a later version...)

Google Web APIs license key limit

As many of you may have noticed, some queries kept returning a result of -1. This was due to the fact that the Google Web APIs license key has a limit of 1,000 queries/day, and any query after that returned an error.

After contacting Google, they were kind enough to increase my key's limit to 10,000 queries/day so this has been solved now.

I'm back!

After a 2-weeks break, I'm back. Wow! I didn't think g-metrics would draw so much attention! Thanks guys!

On the other hand, many of you sent me mails regarding problems... Most of them have been myu fault, I'm working on them and I will let you know (both by posting here and by e-mail). Just give me a couple of days.

Panayotis.