Comparison: Word Owl vs. Oh No Robot
Let’s be honest. It was inevitable that someday a comparison would come out between the current titan of webcomic searching and the pipsqueak upstart.
So I thought I’d get in first. As I said elsewhere in my blog, I don’t dislike Oh No Robot too much; they inspired Word Owl. I think Ryan North and the power at Dumbrella Hosting have done a good job, considering all of the things that Oh No Robot can do. I do have a few real concerns over it, though.
All comparisons are being made based on figures obtained from wordowl.com and ohnorobot.com between 2pm and 5pm GMT+1, 24 July 2008.
Site features
Both sites offer a variety of comic-related features:
| Word Owl | Oh No Robot | |
|---|---|---|
| RSS feeds | Links to comic’s own | Can provide for the comic itself. |
| Customisable search pages | No | Header image and colour scheme can be changed. |
| Comic search results | Colour-coded to show dialogue and its speakers, arranged in panels. A script-like format is also available where necessary. | A script-like format |
| Ability to restrict types of search | Can restrict search based on comic, type of text (including speech / thought / captions / titles / mouseovers etc.), whether safe for work, guest strips, animated strips. Additionally where appropriate to the strip, limiting by character, story arc or additional tags can also be performed. | Can restrict based on scene descriptions, speaker’s names (as part of search text), link text, mouse over text, or ‘all’ |
| Random links | Random link to cover all comics | Random link across all comics, random link for individual comics (to pick a random strip within a comic), plus a browser with a ‘pick another comic’ button. |
| Database downloads for authors | Upon request from the author, in whatever format the author chooses. | From the site itself, in text, CSV or XML. |
| Integration requirements | Basic HTML for a search box; all transcriptions done by Word Owl author. Any other functionality can be discussed with author. | Basic HTML for a search box, JavaScript-enabled browser for transcribers. API available for technical authors. |
| Comic statistics | Various graphs/data made available from transcriptions, including a timeline of all comic strips. | None evident other than totals available |
The raw numbers
On the raw numbers stakes, Oh No Robot wins hands down.
| Word Owl | Oh No Robot | |
|---|---|---|
| Time established | 5 months | 2 years, 8 months |
| Available comics | 7 | 1,189 (according to the front page) 650 (according to the advanced search) 452 (according to the list of series covered) * See comment 1, below |
| Available strips | 3,400 | 82,401 (see comment 2) |
- The disparity does make sense once you start looking deeper. NB I haven’t seen the database files, so this is just my theory. 1,189 = total number of comics signed up with Oh No Robot. 650 = total number of comics that have 1 or more strips transcribed. 452 = total number of comics that have 6 or more strips transcribed, so they appear on the list of strips.
- This figure is the total quoted for each strip (once you select a strip from the Advanced page and hit refresh, it tells you how many strips there are). However, there are strips with duplicated entries, which does inflate this number, although it is not believed to be a massive over-estimation, with perhaps no more than a few hundred duplicates in total. This figure did change as I was looking at the above stats, and will change throughout the day.
I wouldn’t take this as gospel, however. To get some idea of the levels of strips indexed for each comic, I went through about 2/3 of the entries on the advanced search menu. Where they had more than a couple of hundred entries, I also looked at the archive, as I had a feeling that duplicates might be more evident in the larger archives.
Examples of comics with more entries than they’re meant to have: (links point to the ‘archives’ page shown on Oh No Robot, showing the duplicates)
- Bunny - The Book of Random
- Questionable Content
- Scary Go Round
- The Devil’s Panties
- The Last Days of FOXHOUND
- Wigu
- xkcd
It should be noted that it may only be the first page of archive which has duplicates. (I know that with xkcd, though, there are ~450 strips, compared to the reported ~1,160)
In conclusion
The sole reason for this is around the way the two were designed. Oh No Robot gets strips into the index by allowing the comic readers to transcribe. For popular comics, this is great because the odds are that there will be enough dedicated fans to transcribe all the comics reasonably quickly and close to the publication time/date of the comic. For anything else, though, it can be hard work to get the resources to transcribe comics, especially where there is a large back-archive.
Word Owl, however, was designed specifically to capture as much information about each strip as was possible without taking up too much time to transcribe. The upshot of this is that the detail of searching can be much greater than would otherwise be carried out, and that other things such as graphs can be maintained of statistics available for each comic.
I guess it ultimately comes down to quality versus quantity; Oh No Robot has more strips and more comics and will probably continue to do so for the indefinite future, while Word Owl has fewer but more detailed strips. Oh No Robot can also be updated far faster than Word Owl since the submissions are open to all, while Word Owl is maintained by myself and my partner.
Both still have a place in the comic searching world, much like Google and Yahoo! both have a place in the regular searching world, but how things progress, only time will tell.