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

Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

swurl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 341 posts

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#301

Post by ihateolives »

ryes wrote: post #292
abricq wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The possibility to select which column is present - The possibility to add a column for google search with flags, such as `site:stackoverflow.com` - the poossibility to rearrange the order by which columns are displayed Thanks a lot for the heads up and congratulations on creating such a cool UI ! I showed it around at work and everyone loved it ;)

Thank you for replying to my questions. Ok I've added a way to disable Instagram and Twitter. Is there other ones you'd like disabled? Or are you wanting to set specific ones to always show? Right now the ones shown are automatic and dynamic. It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search. This opens up the idea of doing things like knowing you are looking for a code pro…

> It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search.

Please don't do that. It messes with muscle memory. Either have columns always in fixed order or let me customise the order. Google search has dynamic order and while usually Images link is the second one in upper row, sometimes it moves Maps there resulting misclicks. Terrible UX. There are very few cases where dynamic UI makes sense, but IMHO search is not that.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#302

Post by kytazo »

ryes wrote: post #252
kytazo wrote: post #111

I'm almost convinced that such a layout is the future of search results. I think open sourcing the code would turn this thing into the next searx or saerx might end up picking an up an idea or two. In any way it would be great many people contributing to something like this and implement missing functionality. Speaking of it, you can rule out any column you don't wanna see by appending a couple of rules into uBblock…

Thank you for that super nice comment. Just trying to do something new and creative :) If enough people ask to open source that is possible. Just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you!

Boy that was fast! Well done, thanks. Wish you the best for your project, glad others like it as well =)

As far as UX goes another little thing I would suggest is making the flexbox columns grow instead of shrinking so that they properly utilize the entire width of the screen and as a bonus spice you could contemplate about dynamic column width where the primary column (first or possibly hovered one) is proportionate to the rest of the columns in tandem with the golden ratio. I found golden ratio is indeed a really pleasing analogy from vim splits to tiling windows widths or practically everything.

If not for making the columns disproportionate you should definitely make them utilize more of the real estate as they kind of hinder usability and UX when shrieked.

Good luck with everything buddy!

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#303

Post by john-doe »

john-doe wrote: post #199
ryes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for point that out! That could be helpful. Do you think I should implement that? Right now I still use the browser gestures too. I'm just getting better swiping inside vs swiping on the screen edge I guess...

Something like `overscroll-behavior-x: contain;` for the scrolling container?

In your case, for the `main` element. Note that I was referring to desktop browsers gestures (Chromium), but that might help with mobile ones as well.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#304

Post by growt »

ryes wrote: post #213
growt wrote: post #97

Looks really good. But are you using the google search results api? Paying out of your own pocket? Or is it something else?

Thank you, glad it looks good for you. Yes using Google search API. Yes paying out of my own pocket right now. If you know anyone at Google that could lower the price that would be great :) Ya, not break even right now...

I'm actually in the same boat with goosh.org (also paying for it myself). I think bing results might be cheaper at scale because I see a bunch of bigger services using it (like duckduckgo, but they will have a special deal for sure). If I remember correctly there is also a hard limit for google results (10k/day?), so it doesn't scale even if you can refinance it somehow.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#305

Post by jdthedisciple »

ryes wrote: post #231
jdthedisciple wrote: post #176

Nice work! It would be nice if the user could manually toggle which results to show. For example for most searches I may only want to enable Google and Twitter results.

Thank you! So all the time only Google and Twitter? The design thinking I'm going right now is less options to figure out and click, and just make it easy to jump to any source, and do the best possible to show ranked and relevant sources. What do you think? Would love more input and ideas on this!

Yea all the time. My idea was to reduce data traffic that the user maybe a priori not be interested in anyway.

Me as a user I usually prefer more options and customizability.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#306

Post by adamzochowski »

ryes wrote: post #297
adamzochowski wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use gorhill's uMatrix (author of uBlock). uMatrix is awesome as it disables any 3rd party domains and only loads content from main domain that author controls. it also allows blocking by content type. Like iframes. I believe some blockers designed for telemetry blocking, like ghostery or privacy badger, will come with js shims. So they will block google tag manager, but will load a replacement JS to make sure the p…

Sorry ya we need 3rd party domains at least for images so the costs are not crazy with caching/proxying. Maybe just turn it off just for Swurl?

I don't want to be tracked. The options are: swurl is ok with denying users access that it can't spy upon. I am ok with that. Or swurl builds code in a way to gracefully still work if a script doesn't get load. This would be good when google tag manager has a bug and no longer works, and for users who are behind proxy/dns pihole systems or other system settings that prevent them from being tracked.

And for your reference, i enabled googletagmanager in uMatrix, but it still got blocked by uBlock origin. I suspect even if i were to disable both uMatrix/uBlock origin extensions, then my pihole would still block it.

As per using caching proxies , use dns cname. So security conscious people / paranoid configurations know that the caching proxy is in your control and wont leak cookies from other domain accesses. So define something like pix-cdn.swurl.com or static.swurl.com .

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#308

Post by ryes »

abricq wrote: post #300
ryes wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for replying to my questions. Ok I've added a way to disable Instagram and Twitter. Is there other ones you'd like disabled? Or are you wanting to set specific ones to always show? Right now the ones shown are automatic and dynamic. It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search. This opens up the idea of doing things like knowing you are looking for a code pro…

I personally enjoy a lot more when things are manually customizable, but honestly I also don't think that I represent the majority of users ! So yeah, I think that the option to trigger a full manual ordering of the columns would be another great feature :)

That is great insight. Yes auto based on data is usually what works for most. I get that the crowd here would like manual... will need to consider that. The more regular users Swurl gets, the better we can figure out the needs.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#309

Post by ryes »

earth_walker wrote: post #168
croes wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often are there meaningful results for your search terms on Insta?

For me, never. For most of the other people in my life, they are primarily searching for products, books, people, and ideas for recipes or various projects around the home. So I totally see the utility of having these social media sites in the feed. On the other hand, this reduces privacy even more than stock google, basically broadcasting your search terms to a whole bunch of bad actors, so I won't be recommending i…

We have in the header. So the search terms are not broadcast. I mean it is a bunch of tradeoffs. We lean more towards speed and low costs. DDG for example may be even more private, but it is slower and needs a bunch of ads to pay for the higher server costs.

Generally Swurl is super private compared to visiting 99% of all other websites out there. But please let me know if there is anything you think I should add/change to make it more private for you, without hurting speed and costs.

Re: Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time

#310

Post by ryes »

john-doe wrote: post #199
ryes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for point that out! That could be helpful. Do you think I should implement that? Right now I still use the browser gestures too. I'm just getting better swiping inside vs swiping on the screen edge I guess...

Something like `overscroll-behavior-x: contain;` for the scrolling container?

Ok I added that. Please try it now and let me know if that works better for you now.
Post reply on HN