Khan Academy + Instant Search = Khan Instant

http://www.khaninstant.com/

by bjacobso • 16 years ago

98 19 16 years ago

ewams• 16 years ago

Thank you very much. I have been looking for a better search for KA and instant results are a plus.

aik• 16 years ago

Great interface, however: I don't find myself trusting the results when it populates differently depending on how quickly I type a word. Typing "chemistry" at different rates gives different results, including some results that aren't related to chemistry (such as banking). By the way I type generally between 70-140+wpm depending on the word.

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'm "threading" the search to not block the browser, maybe typing fast can interfere with correctly restarting the search. I will investigate!

DanielRibeiro• 16 years ago

Minor bug: "searching" for startup yields two of the same video, instead of the two parts of Khan's presentation on founder equity.

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

Currently, it only "searches" the title of the video and the playlist name. If I had transcripts of the videos (they may exist somewhere?) then it could be WAY more relevant.

Some videos show up twice because the same video exists in two different playlists. I'll fix it.

rokamic2• 16 years ago

Genius. Yep, I said it. But the initial video showed confused me when I did a new search and the video stayed the same. Shouldn't the most relevant video load instantly?

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

I would agree, it is probably confusing initially. It would make sense to follow the heuristics of other instant search sites. However, when I experimented with auto updating the video it just didn't "feel" right. For some reason I think a user selection model is a better UX in this case.

rokamic2• 16 years ago

I think this is a great opportunity to do some A/B experimenting. You could start a new thread.

gojomo• 16 years ago

Great idea. May want to turn off browser's own 'autocomplete' as its popup results obscure the top of those in your page.

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

Excellent suggestion, done. Thanks!

InfinityX0• 16 years ago

Can I get Instant Instant? Where I want to search for a general topic generally and by typing in something, the instant search instant returns the best instant search engine?

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

Very meta. Maybe I will tackle that for my next project.

sovok• 16 years ago

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=instant+search+something

mambodog• 16 years ago

I was just thinking today that they (Khan Academy) should add an instant search instead of the wall of links they have currently. For a user such as one of us, the wall of links is ideal for a CTRL-F find to quickly highlight lessons on, say, vectors, but for non-technical users, this solution may not come to mind.

empire292• 16 years ago

Cool in concept, but your search algorithm leaves something to be desired.

Your app reminded me I wanted to watch Khan's videos on IPOs, so I type in: IPO ... about half way down the list of ~50 results are the videos I wanted to watch (An IPO, More on IPOs).. I actually had to do a Ctrl-F to find them in the result list.

empire292• 16 years ago

bjacobso, what search utility are you using on the backend? -- Are you using YouTube search? - Or are you building your own index using Sphinx,Solr/Lucene,etc. - Or some combination of?

bjacobso6• 16 years ago

It is actually all being done client side. I download a video list in json and create a client side document store. I figured searching 1500 items wasn't worth doing a server roundtrip. I then just search youtube for the title of the video they choose.

I use quicksilver.js to match items. I probably need to increase the score threshold to ensure more accurate results.

dinkumthinkum• 16 years ago

Try "linear algebra," it doesn't really yield good results.

tdupree• 16 years ago

Nicely done! It would be nice if you would allow the user to fullscreen the videos. I think adding "allowFullScreen: true" to your params object for your js embed would add this functionality.

Khan Academy + Instant Search = Khan Instant

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