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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?

#61

Post by sdfx »

qeorge wrote: post #11
chaosmachine wrote: post #6

I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...

I remember this site, I like it. Regarding Google indexing the site, was that toungue-in-cheek? If not, you may want to consider some basic changes to the structure - I think its less that Google doesn't like your site and more that there's very little there to index.

What about curated author pages? Maybe with some information about the author and a list of his books by publishing date. I know, this may be too close to the Mahalo-model, but it could help with your low number of pages to index. You could start with your top searched authors.

And maybe you could show a little more information about the book when you click on it. I'm not sure what data Amazon provides - there must be more than just the picture, no?

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

#62

Post by sireat »

chaosmachine wrote: post #6

I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...

I had forgotten about your site, I still think it looks and works great. In fact, I remember liking your site so much, that I submitted to HN..

How low has the traffic fallen? If you can't get search traffic, maybe there are some other traffic sources?

Usually horizontal scrolling fails miserably, but at bigbooksearch it "feels" natural.

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

#63

Post by jrussbowman »

It's a tie for me.

1. The entire http://www.choip.me website, I built it because I was sick of seeing ads for twitter scams on other tweet longer sites, so I just threw together a Twitter + Disqus mashup on appengine to do the same thing, and provide a better way to take discussions "offline" on Twitter. Not bad for basically a weekend project I think.

2. The custom search portals on www.unscatter.com. Of course I'm still working on it, the interface for creating them is very rough. But the functionality is there. A couple examples of what can be done with it are the Devsearch - http://www.unscatter.com/search/unscatter/devsearch/ and Conservation Search - http://www.unscatter.com/search/unscatter/conservationsearch...

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

#64

Post by andrewtj »

I'm not sure this is the "best feature" that no one uses, but it is one that I've always thought some crafty hacker could do something cool with.

BonjourFoxy[1] adds Bonjour support to Firefox and is predominately used to find websites advertised by printers, network cameras and so on, but it can also be used by other extensions to advertise and discover network services.

Currently the only extension I'm aware of that makes use of this is iGiro[2] which combined with an iPhone app let's you scan bill numbers straight into Firefox's text field.

Now admittedly I haven't got any killer P2P extensions in mind, but surely some other folks out there do —?

[1] http://www.bonjourfoxy.net/

[2] http://igiroapp.se/

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

#66

Post by retube »

rak19 wrote: post #49

http://www.vidteq.com . We are a self funded startup. Usability is bad and performance issuses. How can we drag more people to use this application?

you seem to have a big team. How did you manage to get so many people to all fund themselves?

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

#67

Post by retube »

chaosmachine wrote: post #6

I guess it'd be this entire website (visual amazon search): http://bigbooksearch.com/ Reason for failure? Google doesn't index search results...

Can you clarify what you mean by "Google doesn't index search results" ? Looking at your site, it doesn't seem as if there are any links to crawl.
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