Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#61

Post by kleneway » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:23 PM UTC

This is epic. Nice job.

Name suggestion - start the name with "go", something like "GoDuckDuck" or "GoodSearch" or something much better than that. That way, as people start typing "google", your site shows up in the autocomplete list in the browser and would remind people about your site at the moment they are looking to search for something.

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#62

Post by Bluem00 » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:33 PM UTC

Searched for: "best techno music". I was ready for more results on the initial page and tried to scroll down to them. All I got to see was a screen of whitespace. I don't think it would hurt to increase the number of results that you show. Also, I didn't bother to hit the more links button; I guess I've been trained by existing search engines not to do that, and I expect that other people are the same.

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#63

Post by brianmckenzie » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:35 PM UTC

You score major points with me just for having a duck in the logo.

Also, my search results were quite relevant. I'd reduce the font size a bit, and maybe lose the styling on the search button.

Good for a first try.

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#64

Post by skolos » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:40 PM UTC

I really like the results. I'd like to invest :)

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#65

Post by zaatar » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:47 PM UTC

Very impressive with the relevancy of the results!

Here's one not-so-nice search, however:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=jace

See other searches to get an idea of what you're missing:

http://www.google.com/search?q=jace

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#66

Post by trevelyan » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:48 PM UTC

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #2

Hi all, I would really appreciate any feedback. Here is some more info: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

Good job. You're finding quality stuff in the field I care about, and ignoring some irrelevant junk. Keep it up!

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#67

Post by huhtenberg » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:49 PM UTC

siong1987 wrote: post #23

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite simply, I looked at the current state of search and saw a path through which I could add something useful to the space. There are all sorts of issues with current search, most of which have been discussed on this forum elsewhere. Relevancy is certainly one of them, but there are others too, e.g. spam, clutter, discovery, and UI.

I did something similar with Yahoo! BOSS APIs but I used terminal-liked console as the UI. Sometimes, I really think that it will be more useful for hackers to use a Terminal-liked search engine - http://geeky.siong1987.com . It is a bit slow because the whole application is not well-architectured. I sacrificed too much speed power for the developer feature. About your application, I think the name of the search engi…

Reminds me of Google's command line interface - http://goosh.org

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#68

Post by smhinsey » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:58 PM UTC

walesmd wrote: post #18

Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the design made me temporarily go blind. In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we return…

I agree about the name, but at the same time, DogPile was able to be successful for a time (maybe they still are? I have no idea) with what is arguably a worse name.

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#69

Post by PieSquared » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 9:59 PM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #44

I really need to see the URLs for hits.

So that's what was missing! I knew something was disrupting my normal flow of analyzing search results... and now that you mention it I realize I usually look at the URL's, sometimes even before the article title.

Re: Ask YC: What do you think of my new search engine?

#70

Post by inovica » Thu, Sep 25, 2008, 10:33 PM UTC

markm wrote: post #35

walesmd wrote: post #18

Pretty impressive results for the terms I searched for. Unfortunately, the design made me temporarily go blind. In all seriousness, the name is pretty horrible and I "feel" as if I am using a website, not a tool. Google feels like a tool - I get in an out quickly, it doesn't invade my flow. Your application (and others, like Mahalo) are so visually invasive I would never use them, no matter the results that we return…

I disagree, I think it has the quirkiness, the edge to actually make people use it. I also don't find it visually invasive.

I agree with you. I really like it. Worked well for me. I'm also incredibly impressed with the results. Is this a search engine grown from the ground up with its own crawler or is it using an existing dataset? If self-created this must be worth something right now