Link Owl - Can I stop it linking certain words ?

Is there any way of stopping link owl from automatically adding it's links on an ad-hoc basis. Most of the time it does a great job but if i add something like "derive the Taylor series from from first principles" it erroneously adds a link to derivation from first principles

1 Answer
Aug 8, 2017

For all intended purposes, not really.

Explanation:

For starters, we can't change the terms that Link uses as keywords to add links to Socratic content ourselves, which implies that this is a job for the engineers.

Now, in order to get Link to stop adding links erroneously, the team must tweak its code to include special cases.

The problem with that is exactly what you mentioned--most of the time, Link does a great job. So if it works adequately well in most cases, they won't go in to get it to work even better.

Long story short, this comes down a if it ain't broke, don't fix it type of thing. For all intended purposes, Link works properly. As you've noticed, there are several exceptions, but they're still too few and far between to get the team to start tweaking Link's code.

That said, the team will eventually fix Link, but that will most likely happen once they'll be able to redistribute some resources from the Socratic app.

Until then, we pretty much have to make do with what we have.