We watch inspirational movies like The Social Network, we read success stories and biographies of great and successful people, we get motivated and most of us end up being wishful Mark Zuckerbergs or Steve Jobs’ or insert any person’s name you idealize. It takes some real pounding from inside to actually bestir oneself and start coding.
About a year ago, a Stanford student Feross Aboukhadijeh drew his inspiration from the then recently launched Google Instant search and created a real-time search engine for YouTube videos called YouTube Instant. Besides creating a successful search service, Feross also succeeded in inspiring Deepanshu Mehndiratta, a second year engineering student at BITS-Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus, to create a similar real-time live search service for Wikipedia, one of the most popular and used sites on the web.
Deepanshu says that it was during some research he was doing for one of his course related projects that he had to go through a lot of Wikipedia articles and found it very cumbersome to browse the articles through Google or the default Wikipedia search page. He thought it’d be quite easy to search for an article if you could get a preview of the page you are about to visit by just typing into the search box. And thus the idea of a Wikipedia Live Search struck him. Using Wikipedia’s APIs, Ajax, jQuery libraries and Javascript he set out on this project and 5 hours later, http://www.wikilive.in was up and running. For those into web development, the application base consists of AJAX to the Wikipedia Search Engines and jQuery library & Javascript for a pleasant and user friendly view.
I hope that Wikilive helps you browse Wikipedia the way Deepanshu intends it to and that this story motivates you to take that first step into creating something really awesome.
You can find more about Deepanshu on his webpage -http://www.deepanshumehndiratta.com/
source: http://goo.gl/gYQrN
