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by tokenizerrr 3798 days ago
What would be really awesome (and probably insanely difficult to make) is an API which does something similar to what Google does when you define: stuff. It usually comes from a dictionary, but sometimes it has more interesting sources. I'd love to put something like that in an IRC bot.
1 comments

This is even more experimental than the main service, itself, but does something like this meet your needs (genuinely curious)? https://tuvalie.com/fae/?q=Albert%20Einstein&api
While that is useful, it wouldn't meet these particular needs. What I'd want is a single piece of text, with maybe a link, giving a best-effort description/explanation of the subject.

So when specifying "Albert Einstein" Google gives:

> Albert Einstein. BrE. (1879-1955) a physicist, born in Germany, who was possibly the greatest scientist of the 20th century. In 1905 he published his theory of relativity. This led to the equation giving the relationship between mass and energy, E=mc2, which is the basis of atomic energy.

But when specifying "hubbub" Google gives:

> a chaotic din caused by a crowd of people. "a hubbub of laughter and shouting"

Stuff like that, where it (somehow) automatically determines which piece of information is most relevant. Again, I don't think this is really doable without having as much search data as Google does.