I Google everything • Hacker News Board

Re: I Google everything

#21

Post by damncabbage » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

waterhouse wrote: post #11

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

> I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? Try the wget command line tool; it's generally useful for site-mirroring. "wget --mirror" will recursively download an entire website; if it is impractical to download all of Wikipedia, you may test with the option "-l " to get only a part; then "-p" will make it get all images and wh…

Please don't do this; Wikipedia provides dumps for exactly this purpose:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Eng...

(Further explanation regarding the use of robots, spiders and 'wget -m' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#Ple... )

Re: I Google everything

#22

Post by panarky » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

You can get a monthly XML extract for the English Wikipedia here:

http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20120802/

Your choice whether to get the current snapshot or an archive of all edits from the beginning of time.

Amazing how 7zip can achieve 100-1 compression, so that all articles plus all edits are only 62 GB compressed.

Re: I Google everything

#23

Post by Codhisattva » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:34 PM UTC

The problem with Google is that it's mostly out of date.

Re: I Google everything

#24

Post by uncoder0 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:40 PM UTC

Heads up to the author. This site is pretty horribly broken on chrome for Android. The left menu bar is fixed width and I can't even scroll to see the text.

Re: I Google everything

#25

Post by poblano » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

The comedian Pete Holmes did an amazing routine on exactly this phenomenon, on Conan O'Brien:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ

Re: I Google everything

#26

Post by hk_kh » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

I also like this http://thewikireader.com/

Re: I Google everything

#27

Post by edanm » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:51 PM UTC

Great article.

A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 seconds to just find it out.

And they don't seem much interested in the answer when I provide it, actually.

Re: I Google everything

#28

Post by vecinu » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #27

Great article. A side point, but one that is more interesting to me: in my social circle, I'm the only person who actually Googles everything. When I sit down to have a conversation with most people, and questions about facts come up, I instinctively start Googling. Almost no one else does this. People will prefer to spend an entire conversation trying to guess the population of e.g. Greece, rather than spend 5 secon…

Interestingly this happens with a certain group of friends as well. They are high-school educated people that have no intention of attending a post-secondary institution. As a corollary, another group of friends that have attended a post-secondary institution are usually the first to join in my quest for facts on Google or Wikipedia.

Re: I Google everything

#29

Post by manaskarekar » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

hk_kh wrote: post #26

manaskarekar wrote: post #3

Mandatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/903/ You know, I do this a lot. It affects me in interviews as well. But the paranoid OCD geek in me wants to retain a local copy of all the information in case the internet ceases to be, and as much as I can in my brain. I have considered locally copying wikipedia but given up after the effort that might be required. Anyone got any experience or tips? This is also why I love man page…

I also like this http://thewikireader.com/

That's awesome! I wonder if there are any options with a bigger screen, or if any of the ereaders can be made to store wikipedia locally.

Re: I Google everything

#30

Post by CodeCube » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 2:57 PM UTC

The problem with this is that while it's super easy to look up facts, it's also super easy to spread false information on the web and make it look official and correct. It's quite amazing how many conspiracy videos are on youtube (along with 'true believers' sharing them on facebook). You can look at it as enabling niche information to get out, or you can look at it as a mass fleecing of a generation.