True Knowledge - Blog

Updated Firefox Addon, Including Firefox 3.6 Compatibility

Our Search Enhancer Firefox addon has been updated. Top new improvement is Firefox 3.6 compatibility, meaning you can continue to use our plugin when the latest new Firefox version is released (any time now).

We also tweaked it a bit, fixed a few minor bugs, and generally polished it to make it an even nicer addon to have.

If you have set your Firefox to automatically check for addon updates, it's likely you would have gotten the update already or will do soon. Otherwise, click on the Tools menu, select Addons, and in the new popup window, click the Extensions tab at the top. This will show you a list of your currently installed addons, and at the bottom is a button that says "Find Updates". Firefox will then find all updated addons, including the True Knowledge Search Enhancer.

one million unique visitors

Our web analytics reports have revealed that we hit a small milestone in the last couple of days: more than one million people used our websites in the previous calendar month for the first time.

This wasn't a one off or a particularly special month (with the holiday season quite the opposite in fact). We've been consistently doubling our traffic every month or so for a long time by publishing more and more answers to our users' questions using our technology. Users search for this content and find it valuable and we've continued to grow.

We also believe this is just the beginning. Our question answering capabilities are getting better all the time and in addition to work on our core platform we've been working hard on a new version of our main site which we hope to start testing with external users in the very near future. 

2010 is looking to be a very exciting year.

Knowledge Bit: True Knowledge Answers Inside Second Life

One of our API users and Second Life player, Taylor Dondich, contacted us yesterday about a very cool Second Life device he built called Knowledge Bit. When you enable it inside Second Life, it creates a device that hovers nearby. Interacting with it is via a chat window where you type in questions and it queries True Knowledge to get the answer.

Taylor made a nice short demo video of Knowledge Bit, embedded below, that shows you how it works and tells you how he made it. He uses the API proxy idea we described recently to communicate with the API and interface with Second Life.

Taylor's username in Second Life is Deflux Dollinger. And if you're interested in learning more about our API, please start at our API home page.

Going to LeWeb'09 Conference

Next week is the LeWeb'09 conference in Paris, and our CEO, William Tunstall-Pedoe, and Commercial Director, Mitch Pender, will be there!

Come up and have a chat at our stand in the Demo Zone where they'll be showing you the latest and greatest at True Knowledge.

Wondering When

As 2009 draws to a close, it seems a lot of people are asking True Knowledge when events have happened, and are looking to the future asking when some events will happen.

It all started with when do the clocks change a few weeks ago, but already some people are asking about the start of British summer time!

Of course Christmas is on people's minds and so we're seeing people wonder How long is it until Christmas? and asking which day of the week it will be. We're also helping people buy a christmas tree and the christmas tree decorations, and also a tree stand if they want one.

People are also keen to start planning 2010. We're seeing people ask about Easter in 2010, Good Friday, and the ever-important Easter Monday holiday.

Speaking of holidays, people are wondering when is Presidents day in 2010, the May bank holiday (known as Whitsun or Whit Monday) and even Thanksgiving in 2010! We've barely had the US 2009 Thanksgiving and our users are already keen on the next one.

Underlying Technology

The answers to the examples above hide quite a bit of cleverness our knowledge engine does. For example, Christmas is always on the 25th of December, and so asking When is Christmas? returns just the date without a year. However, asking When is Christmas in 2010? will give the full date including the year.

Other types of holidays are not fixed but fall on different days each year; Easter for example. Our knowledge engine recognizes this situation and thus asking When is Easter? will always return an answer with a full date that includes the year.

Yet another type of time-related question is completely dynamic questions, such as asking How long is it until Christmas? The answer to this question changes every second as we approach the actual day. Currently we return a nicely-formatted answer in years, months, and days as the answer warrants.

A nice variation is mapping dates back to holidays. Because True Knowledge has extensive knowledge about holidays around the world, we can answer questions about specific dates in a given geography. For example, Was January 2nd 2009 a holiday in Scotland?

Finally, there is another type of time-related questions we can answer: which day of the week a given date was, for example What day of the week was 25/1/77? Yes some people can mentally work the answer, but for the rest of us, True Knowledge can help.

Of course you can try these by asking us or querying our API time-related questions.