Web search and sources

Explain teaches from its own knowledge by default, and that knowledge stops at a cutoff date. When your question needs something newer, Explain searches the web before it writes the lesson.

When your prompt includes a link, it opens the page and teaches from what the page says. Both are ways of giving a prompt context, like pasting code or attaching documents.

When Explain searches

You don't switch search on, and there's no setting for it. Before an explainer is written, Explain reads your prompt and any attachments and decides whether the lesson needs the web.

It searches when the topic may have changed recently: library and framework versions, new APIs and releases, products, prices, news, or anything you call "latest", "new" or "current".

Lasting concepts, such as how closures work or what DNS is, don't need a search, so Explain answers those from what it already knows.

So if you want the current state of something, say so in the prompt:

›what changed in the latest React release?

If a search turns up nothing useful, the explainer teaches the lasting concept and avoids stating current facts it couldn't check.

Linking to a page

Paste a URL into your prompt and Explain opens the page before writing, then builds the explainer from what the page actually says instead of guessing from the address:

›walk me through this article for someone new to databases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-ahead_logging

If the page won't open, comes back empty, or sits behind a paywall, the explainer says plainly that it couldn't read the page and teaches what it reliably knows about the topic instead.

Linking works for pages Explain can open on the public web. For a file you have, or a page it can't reach, attach it instead.

Sources

When an explainer was grounded in a web search, its watch page lists the sites it used in a Sources row under the description.

Each source is a pill showing the site's domain: hover it to see the page title, and click it to open the page in a new tab.

Each site appears once, however many of its pages were used. The first six show as pills, and any more are counted after them, as in +3.

Sources are part of the explainer, so everyone who can watch it sees them, not only you.

When Explain doesn't search

Some explainers are built from a page that's already been read for them, so they skip search and link reading:

• Page explainers from the Chrome extension teach from the text of the page you're on.
• Explainers on hn.watch teach from the story's article and its Hacker News discussion.