Gutschriften
AskRobots is built on open data and open-source software made by many other people. This page credits them and gives their licences. Listing a source here doesn't mean it endorses AskRobots.
Data
Lists and datasets that help us decide what to crawl, how to rank it and how to read it.
- Tranco
- A research list of popular websites: which well-known sites to crawl first and how much.
- Majestic Million
- Sites ranked by the links pointing to them: one of our site-importance signals.
- Chrome UX Report (CrUX)
- Which sites Chrome users visit most, in rank groups: a site-importance signal.
- Common Crawl web graph
- Link-based site rankings (harmonic centrality and PageRank): a site-importance signal.
- Wikipedia external links
- How often English Wikipedia articles link to a site (counts only, no article text).
- Wikidata
- The official websites of well-known organisations, and their names.
- DMOZ, the Open Directory Project
- Titles and descriptions of sites we have not visited yet, and the start of our topic directory. The directory closed in 2017; its listings are from 1998 to 2017.
- Public Suffix List
- Telling a site apart from the domain it sits under (lib.example.edu belongs to example.edu).
- fastText language identification (lid.176)
- Recognising the language of each page we index.
- CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
- How words sound, for "Did you mean" spelling suggestions.
- Peter Norvig's English word counts
- How common each English word is, for spelling suggestions (counts from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus).
- english-words
- A list of English words for spelling suggestions.
- Webster's Second International word list
- More English words for spelling suggestions.
Local results
The Houston businesses the search engine shows above some results.
- OpenStreetMap
- Businesses and places in the Houston area: names, kinds, addresses, opening hours and websites (the Texas extract from Geofabrik).
- Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR)
- Which Houston-area companies hold an active state licence (for example A/C contractors and electricians), from the TDLR list on the Texas Open Data Portal.
- Texas State Board of Plumbing Examiners (TSBPE)
- Which Houston-area plumbing companies hold an active licence, from the board's free licensee list.
Quick answers
Sources of the short answers shown above the results.
- National Weather Service
- Current conditions and forecasts for US places.
- US Census Bureau Gazetteer files
- Finding US cities, towns and ZIP codes on the map (with Census population estimates to pick the likely place).
- Wiktionary
- Word definitions.
Ads and accounts
Data askrobots.com itself uses to place ads and to keep the billing rules.
- US Census Bureau 2024 Gazetteer files
- US cities, towns and ZIP codes with a point inside each, so an advertiser can show an ad near a place they type.
- MaxMind GeoLite (GeoLite2 City)
- Your US state, and roughly where you are, from your network address: for the states where we can't take payments yet, and for ads shown in a state or near a place. Looked up on our own server for each request and never stored.
- Hosting providers' address lists
- The address ranges that Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner and Vultr publish for their servers, fetched weekly: a click on an ad from one of them is a machine's, never charged.
Software
Open-source software AskRobots runs on. Thank you to everyone who makes it.
- Python
- The language AskRobots is written in.
- PostgreSQL
- Our databases.
- PgBouncer
- Database connection pooling.
- Tantivy
- The search engine's full-text index.
- Flask
- The search engine's web application.
- Gunicorn
- Serves the web applications.
- nginx
- The web server in front of the search engine.
- fastText
- Runs the language identification model.
- Django
- The askrobots.com web application.
- Django REST framework
- askrobots.com's API.
- django-allauth
- Accounts and signing in.
- Celery
- Work done in the background.
- Redis
- Queues and short-lived counts.
- htmx
- Loads parts of a page after it opens.
- Bootstrap
- Page layout and styles.
Fonts and icons
- Newsreader
- Headings. By Production Type.
- Font Awesome Free
- Icons in the workspace.
KI
Some search features, such as the summaries beside the results and related searches, are written by open-weight language models that run on our own hardware. No search is sent to an outside AI service.
In the workspace, the AI features you choose to use (such as help with a task, or writing and image tools) send what you give them to outside AI providers. The privacy policy names them.
Something missing?
If we use your work and haven't credited it properly, please contact us or write to dan@askrobots.com and we'll fix it. More about us: About AskRobots.