hogdex is a Toronto news and info search engine. We visit the Toronto news sites regularly so our index is always up-to-date. General subject search engines simply can't visit the Toronto news sites as often as us.
There is a search box at the bottom of the home page
where you can search for anything.
There are clickable icons for some common searches and the main part of the home page
is the "splatter".
Yeah, what's with that?
The "splatter" is a "map" of the
100 most important words from the Toronto news sites.
(We index non-news Toronto sites too - but they aren't included in the splatter.)
So you take these key words from your own predetermined list of important
things, right? What are ya, God? Deciding what's important?
Currently, it crawls the indexed sites and tosses all the words into a database.
Small/common "noise" words like "but", "the", "is", etc. are discarded.
Then we count occurrences - if a word occurs a lot it gets a higher
rating. If the word is in title case (Like This) the rating is bumped
up. We demote smaller words based on their length. There is a bit
more in there but you get the idea. Then its all sorted ... that's
how we get the top 100. We are always working on ways to improve
our heuristic.
The size
of a word
depends on it's
rank in the
top 100. Words that appear
together in the indexed sites also appear near each other on hogdex
- this what gives it the map-like quality.
What's this "hogcrawler" that just crawled by site? How do I get my site
on hogdex?
Please see our hogcrawler page.
Why "hog"?
You might be wondering why this sleek and efficient tool has "hog" in
it's name. Here's why:
- Well, first, we wanted to be a bit out of the
box with the name. How boring is: Superfast Search or EasyQuick Search, etc.
- A nickname for Toronto is Hogtown. We think
it's shocking that none of the major sports teams are called The Hogs.
- Pigs are the best and only truffle hunters
- which is kind of like what a search engine does: find tasty
morsels in a forest.
- We are from the city but the few times we have
seen a pig they seem smart. And they aren't afraid to roll around
in the mud. We think they are underrated.
- Thought a hog would look neat in a logo.
- More on "hogtown"
