Quiz Bowl Search Engine

[whaatt]

So it appears that finding stop-gap measures for Quizbowl DB has become my new hobby. With that, I present to you Untitled: A Quiz Bowl Search Engine. Since QBDB has been down for a while now, it's become hard to research tossups and study for tournaments, and I figured something to suffice until QBDB comes back up would be good. It's not super complete in terms of searching features, but if there's interest, I'll develop.

You can check it out at http://www.skalon.com/untitled, and view the source code at https://github.com/whaatt/Untitled. By the way, this will be called Untitled until someone can suggest to me a nice name. Your ideas are greatly appreciated with this or anything else for that matter. Thanks!

[kevink]

Cool!

It took a while to figure out that the search bar was that green bar below all the text. It's fine to eschew the default styling, I think that's a rather nice way to keep search subtle, but I'd suggest that you put some placeholder text so that people can discover that they're actually supposed to type there. Also, I'd be worried about scalability since it looks like you're scanning/loading/parsing the entire database on every request.

[whaatt]

It took a while to figure out that the search bar was that green bar below all the text. It's fine to eschew the default styling, I think that's a rather nice way to keep search subtle, but I'd suggest that you put some placeholder text so that people can discover that they're actually supposed to type there. Also, I'd be worried about scalability since it looks like you're scanning/loading/parsing the entire database on every request.

Weird, I had placeholder text at some point; not entirely sure when/why I removed it. And yeah, the JSON scan/load/parse thing is only until I get around to writing a script for loading that file into an SQL database -- which will allow me to create more advanced searches, as well. Thanks for the feedback!

[Eddie]

Looks pretty cool. I would suggest having a feature that enables users to look at multiple questions at a time, like Quizbowl DB does.

[whaatt]

Looks pretty cool. I would suggest having a feature that enables users to look at multiple questions at a time, like Quizbowl DB does.

I'm certainly considering this. Thanks for the suggestion! BTW, Quizbowl DB is right back up again. That means I don't plan to devote much time to this in the short term, though I will work on it as a side project for periods when QBDB is down. It will remain perpetually up on my servers.

[tintinnabulation]

Looks pretty cool. I would suggest having a feature that enables users to look at multiple questions at a time, like Quizbowl DB does.

This would be very very very helpful, if you have time to do it.

[Corry]

Well, the Quizbowl DB has been down for 3 weeks now. Is there any chance of getting this project revived?

EDIT: And... now it's back up. Well, I suppose that's convenient. :P

[whaatt]

Well, the Quizbowl DB has been down for 3 weeks now. Is there any chance of getting this project revived?

I'll certainly put it on my TODO list! When I made this, I had no intent of providing a strong viable alternative to QBDB, but if these sorts of outages seem to continue, I'll put in more work than the one hour of crude coding I had done previously. Keep posted here for updates.

[whaatt]

Well, the Quizbowl DB has been down for 3 weeks now. Is there any chance of getting this project revived?

I'll certainly put it on my TODO list! When I made this, I had no intent of providing a strong viable alternative to QBDB, but if these sorts of outages seem to continue, I'll put in more work than the one hour of crude coding I had done previously. Keep posted here for updates.

Rohit from Bassett HS just posted his QB search engine, Quinterest, on the forum. I figured it'd probably be counterproductive at this point to update Untitled and create a competitor, and instead I'm probably going to see what I can do to help that project out. However, this project will never be totally abandoned, and I might just finish it anyway or revive it if need be.