connexion.me → notes

How a run is produced, what the raw files are, and how you may re-use them

Everything on this site is one procedure run over and over. This page is that procedure, the files it leaves behind, and what you are allowed to do with them.

What one board is

A board is a single buying question asked 44 different ways.

• The 44 phrasings are fixed before anything is asked. No vendor is named in any question. Every product on a board is a name an engine volunteered — nothing was brought to the run as a candidate list, so there is no list for us to have stacked.
• Each phrasing goes to every answer engine we can reach, through their APIs, not through a browser session. Engines differ per board: each board states the ones it was put to, and ranking.json carries the exact model string under engines.
• One answer is one API response. 44 phrasings multiplied by the engines used is the answer count printed on the board.
• Product names are extracted from each answer and counted once per answer, however many times a single answer repeats a name. Share is the percentage of answers a product was named in at all — not a score, and not a weighting we chose.

The second run

Every category is measured twice, from scratch — run A and run B, the same 44 questions asked again. Both runs are published, not only the one the table is drawn from, and every board prints its own run A/run B top-ten overlap.

A category built from a request is only published behind four checks that are commands rather than judgement calls: at least 12 distinct products named, top-ten overlap of at least 8 out of 10 between the two runs, no product above 95% share, and no top-five product that was named in only one phrasing. The last two are the ones that catch a wrong board rather than a thin one — a single name in nearly every answer is usually an extractor that has collapsed a category onto one string, and a top-five product carried by one phrasing is usually a question that leaked a brand name.

The files beside every board

A board lives at https://connexion.me/c/<slug>/. Five files sit at that same path, and they are the entire measurement — the page is only a rendering of them.

file	one line is
answers-runA.jsonl answers-runB.jsonl	one engine answer, verbatim — engine, model, index, phrasing, text, error
mentions-runA.jsonl mentions-runB.jsonl	the products extracted from one answer — engine, index, phrasing, names
ranking.json	the board itself — category, answers, phrasings, engines, engine_labels, answers_by_engine, partial, and vendors, each carrying vendor, key, mentions, share, by_engine, phrasings_named_in and rank

The .jsonl files are NDJSON: one JSON object per line, no enclosing array, so they stream and you never need to hold one in memory. index is the phrasing number, 0 to 43, and it is the join key — the same index and engine in the answers file and the mentions file are the same question put to the same engine.

Reading them

Nothing here needs a client, a key or an account.

curl -s https://connexion.me/c/hotel/ranking.json | python3 -m json.tool | head

# every product the extractor took out of run A, most-named first
curl -s https://connexion.me/c/hotel/mentions-runA.jsonl \
  | python3 -c 'import sys,json,collections; c=collections.Counter()
[c.update(set(json.loads(l)["names"])) for l in sys.stdin]
[print(n,v) for n,v in c.most_common(15)]'

# the verbatim answer behind one cell: phrasing 0, as ChatGPT returned it
curl -s https://connexion.me/c/hotel/answers-runA.jsonl \
  | python3 -c 'import sys,json
[print(json.loads(l)["text"]) for l in sys.stdin
 if json.loads(l)["index"]==0 and json.loads(l)["engine"]=="chatgpt"]'

If a count on a board disagrees with what you get out of these files, the files are right and we want to hear about it: lana@connexion.me.

Re-use and attribution

You may re-use the raw answers. In the words it was granted in, on 2026-08-08:

…you have the right to re-use the raw answers in later work with attribution, including inside your open-source tooling, with no restriction on scope, medium or duration.

That is the standing grant, and it is not specific to the person it was first written to. Concretely, and with nothing held back for later:

• Any medium, any scope, any duration. A blog post, a paper, a talk, a dataset, a product, a repository. Commercial use included. There is no field-of-use restriction and no expiry.
• Inside open-source software — vendored into a repository under whatever licence that repository uses — is explicitly covered.
• Attribution is the one condition. Name connexion.me and link the board the data came from, so a reader of your work can check it the same way you did.
• Publish what the data says, including when it contradicts us. No approval step, no review of your draft, no co-branding, and nothing we would ask you to soften.

Two things this grant does not cover, because they are not ours to give: the engines' own terms for their outputs, which are between you and them, and any file we have handed someone privately at an unlisted URL — that stays under whatever was agreed when it was handed over. Everything published beside a board is covered.

What this is not

It is a measurement of what answer engines said, on a stated date, in response to stated questions. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on what to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here; that gap is the interesting part, not a defect of the product.