duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-spice — pull request #27 by taw (2012-05-14 13:04:18+00:00)
Title: Spice plugin for zanran.com

Hi,

I've written spice plugin for zanran.com (a search engine for statistical data - pdfs, graphs etc.).

API at zanran.com is meant for integration with other search engines (like duckduckgo) and
only returns results if we think the query is "quantitative", that is if we think we're likely
to have relevant answers. First stage filtering is done by regexp in Zanran.pm,
then the rest happens on the side of zanran's servers.

The idea is that about ~0.1% of all queries from a general purpose search engine
(as estimated from AOL query dataset etc.) should have data&statistics result included,
so we don't want to include them for 99.9% of queries where they're unlikely to be relevant.

Example of "quantitative" queries:
* oil production saudi arabia
* construction injuries australia
* agriculture contribution to gdp

Here's a screenshot from test server - http://i.imgur.com/bfPQw.png

Included in the commits:
* .pm and .js for zanran plugin
* bug fix for bible plugin (unrelated)
* tests for zanran and bible plugins
* test server for manually testing zanran spice plugin (I wanted to make the test server
support all goodies and spice plugins, but I couldn't figure out how to get
js links from the API, the best I could do is figuring out which plugins match,
but that's not enough)

For technical reasons it's disabled on IE6.

That's only the first version, we're still tweaking the API and our algorithms
for deciding which queries are likely to be "quantitative" and which aren't.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Another thing, !zanran would be a nice thing to add.