

Show HN: Online thesaurus - Ologn
http://www.matchingwords.com

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Ologn
This is a website I just launched.

I've solely been doing Android stuff for the past three years. The last
Android app I launched, in conjunction with another programmer, was a
Thesaurus app. There are a few Android thesaurus apps out there, but ours does
all the EFIGS languages (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish) as well as
one or two others.

The Android app is built on such things as the BSD licensed MyThes library and
the LGPL licensed Hunspell library. We connect to the open source C/C++
libraries via JNI, do some Android UI and some other coding, and voila, a
useful app. MyThes does the thesaurus part, Hunspell is useful for certain
things - like finding word stems so that we are accepting plural for nouns
(mouse or mice), or some different tenses for verbs (sing, singing, sung).

All the different language libraries were too big to pack with the Android APK
so we made the language libraries free download packs. But then the app is
useless while it is being downloaded. So I wrote a backend API to do
MyThes/Hunspell on a Linux VPS and ctypes C/C++ library foreign functions for
Python, so that people could avoid downloading the language packs if they
wanted, or at least could search words while waiting for their language pack
to download.

Once all that was in place, I said to myself, why not throw a website up? Most
of the work has been done. So I did.

Right now Adwords is rejecting my site for being a "placeholder". At first I
thought it was due to an earlier crawl, or it's bare bones nature, but then I
realized the site didn't work well if Javascript was turned off. So I've made
some accommodations for that.

I haven't launched a website on which I plan to make revenues from ads since
1999, so even though it is bare bones I am excited. It has a lot of that open
source person-hours behind it as well. There's a few English thesauruses
online, but I don't see much for some of the languages we've done. So if
Google smiles on the changes done, perhaps it will have some popularity in
Europe, as these other language thesauruses seem as scarce on the web as they
are in Android apps.

