Have you ever seen malicious advertisements at the top of search results? Maybe you've heard of a company in a newspaper and wonder where the correct place is to sign up? Or maybe there are five to ten different spellings for the domain names, all of which are apparently the official website, in search results and you're not sure which one is the right one? I know I have. I remember searching "Bitchat" and seeing a lot of fake copies before, and I wasn't sure if the version of the Wikipedia page I saw several days ago was vandalized. I recently used my own tool to check if it would still be the same URL before downloading the official app, and yup, it was indeed! Luckily, search engines had cleaned up their results before then, but the dynamic nature of algorithms meant I still didn't trust them. Sometimes, even news articles make typos, like spelling the username of an account as EliLillyandCo (-LLy), rather than EliLiIlyandCo (-iLy). Of course, you probably don't want to see a paid advertisement from an unscrupulous person at the top of the search results. The other day, I saw an r/assholedesign post on my homepage feed and wanted to make the r/antiassholedesign variation, and while I replied late, I believe my meme perfectly captured the spirit of what I was trying to say. So, I'm introducing Funny Crowd, because us netizens love memes just as much as they do with decent-effort attempts at other kinds of humour; I can see how creative elements can also show beneficial information; and, you guessed it, because it's based on crowdsourced knowledge. (And yes, this wouldn't have been as easy had someone not made the knowledge open and copyright free in 2013. Another example of something I found creative was Star Wars Weather, but unfortunately, I never got to use it before it shut down. As of writing this, neither the meme linked in the paragraph above nor the .gov site for the passport renewal referenced in that link are currently searchable or possible to generate using Funny Crowd, as far as I'm aware.) I find it even funnier when the memes don't always fit the templates. You may see a lot of blank spaces on memes with more than two potential lines of text in the original template. This is because the original source my data comes from usually returns one result, but sometimes, the source is incorrectly formatted. Try searching the entries with multiple possible answers and you'll see! I could've shown you a spreadsheet with a list of websites I know, but it would probably become biased towards my personal interests, and not everyone would be interested in the smaller websites no one knows about. This is why I decided to build Funny Crowd on top of a more factually neutral source. However, underneath the memes resulting from every search you make, you will see a direct link to what Funny Crowd "thinks" is the correct website. Unfortunately, Funny Crowd cannot "think" critically the way a human can, and only works the way it's told to. Because anyone can edit a page and place misinformation on there, I even figured that some of you would benefit from a link to report or edit the error directly at the originating source I used. You may start a new topic on the discussion page there to report or, if you're comfortable, edit it yourself (be careful about deleting outdated entries, though)! Please note, you may have to wait up to 300 seconds after you last searched for the results to refresh in your browser. Oh, and one more thing: I must give you all a disclaimer that you may not want to generate too many memes. Why? Funny Crowd uses a third-party service that is inherently computationally expensive because it uses SPARQL, and the service got overloaded from my and other people's requests (not necessarily from this tool) during testing. I refined the query to reduce the overall hardware performance significantly, but as SPARQL is something I'm new to learning, I will continue to monitor the situation (if/when I'm available). This outside source doubles as a crucial resource for academic and other professional research, although the non-profit organization owning the service split up the "knowledge [graph]" in May of this year to two separate services, reducing the risk of this happening. In case of any technical problems, a reference to Funny Crowd is included behind the scenes in every search you make, so important people can reach out to me.   submitted by   /u/MurkyWar2756 [link]   [comments]