# Ask the Web

> Ask a question and get a short answer built from live sources, where every sentence cites a numbered source. The app gathers current Wikipedia articles for the question, shows which passages it picked, then the model answers only from those passages. Click a citation to read the passage with the quoted words highlighted, or open the original article section. No API key needed: finding sources is free and each answer is paid per run with SkillSafe credits.

URL: https://ask-the-web.skillsafe.ai/
API: https://ask-the-web.skillsafe.ai/api.html

## What it does

- Step 1, free: searches Wikipedia in one of 11 languages (en, de, fr, es, it, pt, nl, pl, ru, ja, zh) and fetches the top three articles whole, through the app's own server function.
- You can remove any article, or paste a source of your own (title, optional link, text).
- Splits every source into paragraph-aligned passages that remember the article and section, and ranks them for the question with BM25 keyword search in the browser. The opening paragraph of the top articles is always included.
- Shows exactly which passages will be sent, and the most the answer can cost, before anything is paid.
- Step 2, paid: the model (SkillSafe gpt-terra tier) answers only from those passages. Each factual sentence carries a citation tag, each cited passage gets a verbatim quote, and the answer is marked answered, partly answered or not in these sources.
- The page checks every citation and quote: a tag naming a passage that was not sent is flagged unsupported, a sentence with no tag is marked uncited, and each quote is searched in its passage and marked verified, close or not found.
- Rules the model follows: no outside knowledge, every part of the question answered or named as missing, near-neighbour entities (last year's event, a sequel) never mixed up, disagreements between sources shown with both sides, and "as of" the retrieval date for facts that change.
- Follow-up questions reuse the last three turns to resolve "it" and "they" and can answer from the sources already gathered.
- Export: copy an answer or the whole chat as Markdown with footnote citations and source links, or download it as .md.
- Signed-in chats are saved to the account: questions, answers and the cited passages with their links.

## Price

Free to open and to try with the built-in examples (saved sources and saved answers replay at no cost). Finding sources is free for signed-in users. An answer is one metered run: the page shows the reserve before you ask and the actual charge after; a short answer typically costs a cent or two.

## Sources and licence

Encyclopedia text comes from Wikipedia and is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; each citation links to the article section it came from.

## Limits

- Sources are Wikipedia articles plus anything you paste; general web pages and news sites are not searched.
- Article tables and infoboxes are not part of the fetched text, so a figure that appears only in a table can be missed.
- Keyword retrieval can miss a passage that uses different words from the question; the page shows what was matched so you can rephrase or search again.
- Answers can still be wrong. Open the cited passage before relying on one.