What is this?

This is an experimental interface for finding Wikipedia articles to read when you're doing in-depth research on a topic. Type a topic above to see links to Wikipedia articles that match — English only, for now. As you type, the green bar below the input box will fill with matching Wikipedia links sorted by how popular they are. You can hit enter to go directly to the most popular result on Wikipedia. To the right of the green bar, the links are organized by subject area based on the words they have in common.

Special features

The system is kind of like the "autocomplete" feature that many search boxes have, but with a few extras:

• The results are ranked based on how often they have been viewed on Wikipedia recently, so topical suggestions will tend to show up first.
• The results include internal matches. So for example, to learn about famous expeditions, search for expedition and you'll get "Lewis and Clark Expedition", "Kon-Tiki expedition", and so forth; kennedy will show you famous Kennedys.
• It's resilient to typos, for example greeyere cheese, magna karta, touring machine, Sonya Sottomayoor.
• If you're really not sure of your query, type a question mark ("?") after it. The system will try to find terms that mean the same thing as your query. For example, barrel maker? yields "cooper", ringing in the ears? yields "tinnitus", and museum in paris? yields "louvre". Failing that, the system will try to find a term in Wikipedia that sounds like your query. For example, noomoanya? brings up "pneumonia".

Technical notes

• This service uses the Datamuse API on a vocabulary of approximately 10 million Wikipedia titles and redirects.
• The titles come from the publicly available Wikipedia page view counts for the last 7 days.
• Privacy: This website saves no data other than a count of the number of queries made to it. The API calls and the Wikipedia links use HTTPS. The API server does not log or remember your queries.

Doug Beeferman, 2015-06-16