In table form. Wikipedia is of course great, with its search results coming in first for virtually any encyclopedic search The problem is, most of the information is not organized in a visually friendly manner. That’s where factual comes in. They have just begun their mission of organizing wiki information into easily readable tables. Here’s a simple example.

Say you want to know about restaurants in the area. So you type in Restaurants, Miami Florida. As the video below shows, you’ll get a data table of everything that’s been put into factual by its various users. What you have to do is just narrow down for the type of restaurant you want. You can do this by filtering the columns for the results you’re looking for. Chinese, Thai, fast food, sushi, middle eastern, who can ever eat enough hummus etc. Here’s the table!

The tables are embeddable into your website (as I did right here) and any time a table is updated, your embedded table is updated automatically. Depending on how well this project takes off, expensive databases, such as the ones your local university signs up for that costs something like $50,000 a year, may lose some of their clientele, depending on how much trust these tables get.

When Wikipedia first came out, people were skeptical because anyone could change anything. But as it turned out, people took to it rather quickly, and any wrong information is corrected by Wikipedia’s millions of readers.

You know, this shows something quite warm and fuzzy about humanity. That is, when we work together, we tend to gravitate towards truth. This is why Wikipedia isn’t a jumble of half-researched questionable sources. It tends to be on the money, and with Factual adding to humanity’s data processing abilities…things could get interesting. Check out the video for a complete overview.