Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

occamm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 34 posts

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#3

Post by visarga »

It's fast and apparently wide enough, or at least I found what I searched for. Summarisation is nice.

UI: The refining keywords are hard to read because they are not sorted. The gradient borders around search results are a bit too much, better go with something more understated.

It would be nice to tell a few things about the underlying technology. Are you using other search engines under the hood? How large is the index?

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#4

Post by _tom_ »

There are to many tags to be useful, and the quality of tags is low.

For example, I searched for banana boat, thinking of the song. "Song" was not one of the tags offered. Nor "day-o", nor Belafonte. But I did get "formation of an attorney-client relationship" and "High levels of benzene". It looks like both of those have a high number of other, related tags, like someone pulled a bunch of tags from one or two web pages. I see what looks like a cluster of "sun & sunscreen related" good, but should only be one or two tags. "Food", also good. Also should be just one or two tags. "Law", shouldn't be there at all, unless there is some POPULAR legal aspect of banana boats I'm not aware of, and "toxic chemicals", should be one or two at most, and probably should not be there at all.

I think something is wrong with your clustering. You are not getting the right clusters, and you are going too deep into the clusters you have.

FYI: The song is the first video hit on google, and the top of the second page of general results.

Tried star trek. Still too many tags. Tags are more related, but there are ones that clearly aren't important enough in relation to warrant being a top tag, like "former Viacom", "smaller population countries", "notable exceptions", "extreme example", "generic rule of thumb".

Keep refining! :-)

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#5

Post by jrussbowman »

Ketan-fullstack wrote: post #2

Hi, I have been working on this search engine for the last few months. After you search for something, you can select up to 4 tags to further refine your search. Feedback please :)

Good luck with the project. Out of curiosity are you crawling and indexing yourself or using a search api?

It's really fast, I like that. The amount of tags to choose from is a bit overwhelming.

Hope you get good responses here, the couple times I've posted my search engine I haven't gotten a lot of feedback.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#8

Post by Ketan-fullstack »

_tom_ wrote: post #4

There are to many tags to be useful, and the quality of tags is low. For example, I searched for banana boat, thinking of the song. "Song" was not one of the tags offered. Nor "day-o", nor Belafonte. But I did get "formation of an attorney-client relationship" and "High levels of benzene". It looks like both of those have a high number of other, related tags, like someone pulled a bunch of tags from one or two web pa…

Thanks for your feedback!

yes, you are spot on about the quality of the tags being low for most searches. The current refinement algorithm will get better as more and more people use the service and that would reduce the number of suggested tags and improve their quality over time.

I am however working on modifying the algorithm to make the refinement more useful for current users.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#9

Post by Ketan-fullstack »

visarga wrote: post #3

It's fast and apparently wide enough, or at least I found what I searched for. Summarisation is nice. UI: The refining keywords are hard to read because they are not sorted. The gradient borders around search results are a bit too much, better go with something more understated. It would be nice to tell a few things about the underlying technology. Are you using other search engines under the hood? How large is the i…

Thank you for your feedback!

I take both your points about the UI. Tags are a bit overwhelming. i am working on solving that problem.

Underlying Tech: i am using clojure/redis/mongo on the backed. React/redux on the front end. I am partially using my own index but for the most part (especially for new searches) relying on Bing api.

Post reply on HN