IMPORTANT

This is a legacy repo. We rebuilt this tool from the ground up and you can download it on our website. The new repository, you find here.

WorldBrain's (Re)search-Engine

Welcome to the WorldBrain project. We work on the goal of an increased (scientific) literacy in our global society through a better overall information quality on the internet.

Doing so by developing open-source search tools for professional web-researchers like science communicators, (STEM-) students, journalists, librarians and online debaters to effortlessly find, rate and share qualitative and trustworthy web content/notes with their friends, followers and the public. (Watch the 3.5 min Vision Video)

Our first tool is the (Re)search-Engine, a photographic memory for your web research.

It's an open-source chrome extension to full-text search all the pages you visited and bookmarked, and later also all the apps you use to organise your knowledge (i.e. Evernote, Pocket, Google Drive, Asana, Mendeley) (Watch 2 min Intro Video) (DOWNLOAD HERE)

Table of Content

1. How to use the extension
2. Status & Development Roadmap
3. How to get involved
4. FAQs
5. Installation (as user & developer)
6. How to get in touch with us
7. Acknowledgements
8. Licence

How to use the extension

(Download it here), then type in w+ space/tab+ your keywordsinto the address bar.

For more detailed description, you can watch our Demo Video (2min) or read the text-based tutorial.

Important: All your data is stored and processed locally

Status & Development Roadmap

Here you find the long term roadmap.

Current Stage

Right now, the chrome extension lets you full-text search all the web pages and PDFs you visited and bookmarked.

Full Feature Set

• full-text search history & bookmarks
• filter by time and minuswords
• blacklisting urls, domains, regex
• supports PDFs you visited online
• import existing history and bookmarks

Under Development

We are currently working on replacing the DB with PouchDB and the default search implementation with PouchDB Quick Search

View all "UNDER DEVELOPMENT" issues

Up next

Web-view for results and more filter options.

Currently the results can only be shown in the drop down of the adress bar and filters only applied by entering queries.

To change that, we are adding a web-based results and filter view (much like a google results page), where all results can be shown and a variety of filters applied.

More info in our projects section

How to get involved

• If you are JAVASCRIPT DEVELOPER you can check out our current projects and open tasks
• Wanna help with MARKETING? Contact Oliver via email: [email protected]
• Wanna help us with MONEYYYZ? Wohoo! You can do so by supporting us on Patreon

FAQ

You can reach our FAQ here: reddit.com*/r/*WorldBrain

Installation

AS A USER

Install from the Chrome store here. (If you don't feel comfortable with that, look at Transparent Installation).

Transparent Installation

If you don't feel comfortable installing a Chrome extension that can read and modify all data on the websites you visit from the webstore (we wouldn't either!), you can clone this repository on your local machine, read through our code to verify that it is not malicious, and then install it as an unpacked local extension through the menu in chrome://extensions/. But this way you also won't receive any updates.

Wanna know if the extension installed on your computer has the same code as here on GitHub? See here.

AS A DEVELOPER

Fork the project, then...

Prerequisites

• Install browserify and watchify with npm install -g browserify
• Run npm install to install dependencies

While Developing

• npm run watch

Build

• npm run build

Activate & Test the plugin on your browser

In Chrome

• go to chrome://extensions/
• Activate Developer Mode (top right)
• Click load unpacked extension (top left)
• Select the /build folder from the project

Problems Building the Extension in Windows?

Check this StackOverflow thread

How to get in touch with us

1. via Email: [email protected]
2. Enter our Slack Channel: https://join-worldbrain.herokuapp.com/

Acknowledgements

This tool is originally released under the name "Falcon" and will be further developed to fit the needs of the scientific research community. The original programmers are @andrewilyas and @lengstrom.

License

Currently the (Re)search-Engine is released under GPL-3, as this has been the license of Falcon. We aim to release it under a more liberal license (CC0, MIT, BSD-2/3) as soon as we have replaced all the code from the original Falcon tool.

Our goal is to provide a set of reusable libraries, so that this client can be adapted to as many work-flows as possible.