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Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

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Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#31

Post by Scrockett »

Shameless plug: we're working on a product focused solely on opinions called Cheerboo (http://www.cheerboo.com/).

It's part search/discovery part social, and is trying to solve the problem that all the opinions shared in places like Twitter/Facebook aren't preserved, aggregated or made useful outside of the social graph.

We organize opinions around topics, make people weigh in on topics with a binary rating system (cheer or boo) and use the cheers/boos to give each topic a "RottenTomatoes-style" score. Let us know your thoughts - we love feedback.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#32

Post by dholowiski »

rainysunday wrote: post #27
dholowiski wrote: post #19

Speaking of which, there are 'open' indexes of the web that anyone can download and use to build their own search product. But I can't remember the name of them. Can anyone help? Googling it results in dismal failure. I think there is still huge room for innovation in search. Google has taken a different track, and they're focusing on Machine Intelligence. (in my opinion) search is just a nice side effect, but I real…

Common Crawl: http://commoncrawl.org/

Thank you!!!!

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#33

Post by Scrockett »

cojourneo wrote: post #11

Do you think Twitter has the potential to grow into a new kind of search engine ( http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/what-twitters-n... )? Unlikely I know, but their access to true real-time data presents interesting possibilities I think.

I would assume they're heading in that direction given that they decided not to renew their contract with Google which used to let Google display real-time search results from Twitter.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#35

Post by zackzackzack »

mtgx wrote: post #8
zackzackzack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an interesting claim about DDG being a wrapper for bing. Could you back it up with citations please?

I thought it was common knowledge that DDG uses Bing and a few other sources, except Google. The difference is that they don't track the users in any way and they don't put ads on the page. The fact that it uses Bing is why relevancy is not very good on DDG, though. https://www.ixquick.com is also another alternative to DDG, doing much of the same thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixquick

Thank you! I did not know the full details of this.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#36

Post by milesokeefe »

uiri wrote: post #6

I didn't write a search engine of any kind, I wrote a search front-end of sorts which redirects you to actual search engines (or Wikipedia if your query is an exact article title match). It doesn't handle not-ASCII text very well and there are some other bugs I should iron out and sometimes Heroku is down (hosted for free so I shouldn't complain) but it works well enough for me 99% of the time so I'm not actively wor…

There is a Firefox extension similar to this. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/instantfox/

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#37

Post by milesokeefe »

Scrockett wrote: post #31

Shameless plug: we're working on a product focused solely on opinions called Cheerboo ( http://www.cheerboo.com/ ). It's part search/discovery part social, and is trying to solve the problem that all the opinions shared in places like Twitter/Facebook aren't preserved, aggregated or made useful outside of the social graph. We organize opinions around topics, make people weigh in on topics with a binary rating system…

I love the concept and the design, but I have a few suggestions:

1. Give immediate visual after clicking the cheer/boo buttons. It can take a few seconds for the loading icon and comments to appear, so having the button lighten or change at all would let me know that it is in fact working.

2. Show the number of comments on each subject so that users have an idea of how popular a subject is at a glance without loading the comments.

3. Add a setting to not automatically load comments after cheer/boo -ing.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#38

Post by Scrockett »

milesokeefe wrote: post #37
Scrockett wrote: post #31

Shameless plug: we're working on a product focused solely on opinions called Cheerboo ( http://www.cheerboo.com/ ). It's part search/discovery part social, and is trying to solve the problem that all the opinions shared in places like Twitter/Facebook aren't preserved, aggregated or made useful outside of the social graph. We organize opinions around topics, make people weigh in on topics with a binary rating system…

I love the concept and the design, but I have a few suggestions: 1. Give immediate visual after clicking the cheer/boo buttons. It can take a few seconds for the loading icon and comments to appear, so having the button lighten or change at all would let me know that it is in fact working. 2. Show the number of comments on each subject so that users have an idea of how popular a subject is at a glance without loading…

Thanks so much for the feedback! Agree with your points and we'll work on implementing.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#39

Post by jrussbowman »

My side project isn't exactly a search engine, more of a front end to get recent information from blekko, twitter, Facebook and Google plus.

www.unscatter.com

I use it to keep up to date with topics on a regular basis and also when searching for recent info on topics

I haven't heard about common crawl mentioned in another comment, going to go check that out now.

Re: Ask HN: Who is building a new kind of search engine?

#40

Post by reiz »

I am working on a very specialized search engine for software libraries. You can find it here: http://www.versioneye.com.

I don't think that we need better search algorithms for search engines. I think we just need more filters in the internet. With filters I mean more specialized search engines who are not crawling everything. If I am typing in "Spring" into the search field, I am not interested in "Spring", I am interested in the spring framework. But because most of the people on this planet are not software developers and Google don't know that I am a developer, the spring framework will not be the first result on google.

Of course we need general search engines like google. But I would love to use more specialized search engines who are just showing results to a special topic.

I would like to hear your thoughts about this.

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