True Knowledge - Blog

would you like to work at True Knowledge?

True Knowledge is building what we believe is one of the most exciting projects on the internet and we are always looking for exceptional and passionate people to join us and be part of our success.

A list of specific roles that we are actively hiring for can always be found at this web address

http://www.trueknowledge.com/jobs

and we currently have a wide variety of jobs advertised ranging from the extremely senior to the junior (including engineering, management and product roles).

Even if there isn't a job specification there that exactly matches your skill set, please do get in touch if you have a desire to join us and exceptional talents that you think will benefit us. 

Send us your resume and explain why we should hire you. We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Latest knowledge

True Knowledge is constantly improving as it gains knowledge and learns more about the world. Here are some samples of types of question it can now answer.

Geography The fundamental geographical question is "Where is..?" and True Knowledge has learned that you expect different types of answer depending on the type.  Where is area code 201? should give the state and major cities, Where is the Nile? should describe its course, and Where is Sheffield? should give its location relative to other cities.  We can even tell you Where is Elvis?

Population Our users often ask for the population of a place at a specified time so we're estimating those from known datapoints, eg Population of San Francisco in 1989

Speed  We've added calculations for runners, eg  How fast is 7.7km in 38 minutes? and for drivers How long to travel 54km at 30 mph?

English Dictionary questions are popular so we've added definitions like Define robot, synonym answers like What is another word for terrified?, and made use of our internal spellchecker for spelling lookups eg How do you spell recomend?

Weather Summer is coming on here but what is the weather like in Santa Clara County?  And our days have been getting longer as we approach midsummer, so how about Scandinavia - is it dark in Norway at 10:30 pm?

Nutrition Want to look good for your holidays?  You can try questions like these to plan your diet Is pineapple juice fattening?, How much fructose is in honey? and How many calories are there in 30g of mayonnaise?

Kosmix and the True Knowledge API

Since opening up our API, we’ve had a number of partners use True Knowledge in a variety of interesting ways.  One partner we’d like to highlight today is Kosmix. 

For those of you that don’t know Kosmix, they offer a great service where search terms are used to generate topic pages.  Using Kosmix, a topic page can be produced for almost any topic in the universe, such as: Hamburgers, Amazon Kindle, Google Android, Toni Morrison, Julianne Moore, or Toyota Prius. Each topic page can pull back information specific to that topic (Book Clubs for Toni Morrison or Product Reviews for Amazon Kindle), but there are information types that extend across different classes of topics, like Videos, Images, and Facts.

When Kosmix approached us it was to help them become stronger at presenting facts.  Until recently, Kosmix did not include facts on most topic pages, but since starting to work with True Knowledge they’ve been able to automatically add comprehensive fact listings across many of their topic pages.  Today, our knowledge base contains over 250 million facts about over 8.5 million things.  With such a vast amount of knowledge, we are able to help Kosmix make many of their topic pages more interesting and more engaging.

A great example of how we are working together can be seen on their page for Toni Morrison.  As you look at the page, you’ll notice the second block on the page reads “Facts from Kosmix.” These are facts that they have accessed from our API.  And notice you not only get standard fare like birth date and books written by Morrison, but also deeper factual nuggets like Influences (which include Zora Neale Hurston) and those Morrison has influenced (like Bell Hooks).

 In addition to Kosmix, there are many other sites using our API to add value to their applications in a variety of different ways.  All it takes to give it a try is create an API account where you can see all the possibility of working with True Knowledge. 

Two million users

In January this year we announced that we had crossed the magic one million monthly user mark.

Since then the team here has not let up. We opened the site in February and have continued to make great strides in our knowledge aquisition (crossing 250m facts a few weeks ago). We have also greatly increased the quality of our answers and the percentage of questions we answer.

This effort was rewarded with April's figures which show that we have more than doubled again. 2.2 million people used our websites in April from both mobile and non mobile devices.

Although it is great that so many people are using our products we regard this as just the beginning. Our goal is to provide users with the perfect direct response to questions on any subject. We plan to continue to scale our ability to do this as we acquire more and more knowledge and we hope many more millions of users will use us as we succeed.