Freebase Archive

Today I had a chance to look at Freebase. Freebase is a new web app which launched sometime last week. I finally managed to get an invite today and figured I'd write something up for everybody and spread the word.

Freebase is a more of a community than a web app. They define themselves as a "Shared database of the worlds knowledge." At first when I heard this immediately I thought about wikipedia. Though after a few minutes of exploring and watching their intro video I found that Freebase really isn't anything like wikipedia other than the fact that they rely on their users to improve the content of the site.

So basically Freebase is a web app which allows you to search through large amounts of items pretty quickly, and allows you to search for more complex items than google or really any other search engine.

Freebase is built on top of two fairly simple principles called types and domains. A domain is just a huge category which governs and categorizes types. A type, simply put is a topic. Each item in Freebase is categorized by one or more types, which allows for easier searching and better user experience while searching.

Freebase is pretty cool, it allows you to search a lot of what you normally couldn't search, and it allows you to do it quickly. But there are a few downsides to Freebase. While most people will not get into creating their own domains and types, it tends to be pretty complicated. Beyond just plain searching and adding content Freebase is hard to use and there are some pretty complicated aspects to creating things which I really haven't begun to grasp.

On top of plain ol' searching for stuff on their website, Freebase has a developer API which allows you to query anything within its databases from your own web app. Hopefully this will allow for some cool innovation as far as cool new web apps come out. They even have a list of cool web apps listed in the sidebar of Freebase.

So yeah, I really liked freebase, I'm sure it will help with a few research papers and hopefully it will get better and better as people keep adding content. I'd really like it if everyone could just go and sign up for it. But it is invite only.

So I have 6 invites, if you would like one just email me at Jake@ and I will send you out an invite. Remember it's first come first serve so the first six people get an invite. Invites are gone! Grab the feed and we will post when we have more to give away.