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Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#21

Post by idoh »

chaosmachine wrote: post #12
idoh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That site has a ton of potential. I'm sure with some tweaks here and there it could really take off.

It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it. I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a…

To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.

Just brainstorming here:

- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"

- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).

- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)

- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above

- make it like a reddit, but for covers

- people who searched for x also searched for y

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#22

Post by chaosmachine »

idoh wrote: post #21
chaosmachine wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it. I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a…

To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes. Just brainstorming here: - maybe the hook cou…

I actually built another site around most of those ideas you just mentioned (but changed the idea to films, as I found they worked better):

http://filmvsfilm.com/

It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#23

Post by idoh »

timae wrote: post #18

http://wunbar.com Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere. Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.

I like this site. I feel that having to type in the prefixes might be a blocker for the normal crowd. Have you tried some different UIs to make picking the service happen?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#26

Post by invisible »

chaosmachine wrote: post #12
idoh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That site has a ton of potential. I'm sure with some tweaks here and there it could really take off.

It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it. I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a…

I think you'd gain a lot by:

1) Show the last 200 searches that people had made (or the most popular for the past day, week, etc.)

2) Instead of directly linking to Amazon upon clicking a book/product, perhaps you should fly out some hidden details for the item (not ajax if feasible).

3) You could also have a "Search by Author" and "Search by Topic" link that is provided when you click a book that provides more results with content.

4) Maybe allow people to create book shelves that they can explain the grouping of a set of books and why they go well together (etc!).

5) One last idea: Provide a list beneath that has a tiny bit more info - as they scroll left/right in the top list, have the bottom scroll up/down to show the range that is visible. This would help with you only linking/showing 20 or so results at a time if you let the list (text) show 100 or more.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#27

Post by duck »

timae wrote: post #18

http://wunbar.com Quick and simple to make, thought I could make some money on referral fees, but went nowhere. Failure, I suppose: browsers can do the same thing, with a little setup; and, more importantly, people seem to have a preference to navigate to each of these sites and search them directly.

I like that idea and use DDG's bang feature all the time.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#28

Post by dotBen »

boyter wrote: post #17

Hmmm feature... not really. I did have a website that pulled multiple RSS feeds (thousands) and then parsed each entry matching it to others that it had seen before. It could then show you what was popular at any moment on the web, with the ability to see what the article was linked to, and what they were linked to. It showed some interesting things like how a website was effected by something happening on the world…

not knowing how the producers of the RSS feeds would fee

If I understand what you are saying then I don't think there would be any. It sounds like a neat project, where can we take a look?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best feature you've built that no one uses?

#29

Post by robryan »

Pulling live ebay auctions to match with regular price comparison. It seems that the most effective way to improve conversions on a price comparison site seems to be just to put relevant links to merchant sites front and centre on the landing page, the majority of people coming from Google don't care what fancy value add features you have created.

Freelance work btw, I don't run a affiliate marketing site myself.

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