--- title: 15 years of Dilbert searchable date: "2009-05-22T07:17:47Z" categories: - how-i-do-things wp_id: 2377 description: I indexed 15 years of Dilbert comics, totaling over 5,500 strips, through a collaborative crowdsourcing effort. I discovered that a few dedicated contributors are far more effective than the long tail for building large-scale content databases. keywords: [dilbert, search engine, crowdsourcing, long tail, indexing, comics] --- The [Dilbert search index](http://dilbert-search.appspot.com/) now carries 15 years worth of [Dilbert](http://www.dilbert.com/) comics — over 5,500 strips typed out. This is mainly due to the contributions of [BFMartin](http://www.bfmartin.ca/finder/) (over 6 years worth of strips) and [Paul Dorman](http://www.viscerallogic.com/paul/blog/) (over 3 years worth of strips), [myself](http://www.s-anand.net/) (over 3 years worth of strips) and a long tail of contributors. You can search the strips [here](http://www.s-anand.net/dilbert.html). While you can find strips as far back as 1989, you won’t see the images earlier than 2002 because [geek.nl](http://www.geek.nl/) (whose images I’m shamelessly hotlinking without permission) only holds images that far back. But once you know the date of the comic (say 1991-02-03), you can visit the Dilbert official site at [dilbert.com/1991-02-03/](http://dilbert.com/1991-02-03/) and see the strip. Dilbert started around 20 years ago. So we’ve covered 75% of all the strips, and this is in just [8 months after starting this collaborative effort](/blog/dilbert-search-engine/). A couple of lessons I learnt from this: 1. **Crowd sourcing beats going solo** if you’re building content. It’s a no-brainer. There will always be only one or two people more passionate about something than you. 2. **The long tail is not very big**. There will only be one or two people more passionate than something about you. Don’t expect the long tail contribution to be the significant. The value comes from being able to attract “the big fish”. --- ## Comments - **[Thejesh GN](http://thejeshgn.com)** _27 May 2009 7:57 am_: Thanks for the search engine.