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

I made a 'search engine' for fun

foobub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#21

Post by vu0tran »

ctdonath wrote: post #15

Searching for "foobub" on foobub.com gives http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub - clarification please?

My site does not SEO well.

If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e. http://foobub.com/?s=cats

If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most likely: http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20...

If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you: http://foobub.com/?s=foobub

My website is not yet self-aware. No need to worry, guys.

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#23

Post by jaredsohn »

vu0tran wrote: post #21
ctdonath wrote: post #15

Searching for "foobub" on foobub.com gives http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub - clarification please?

My site does not SEO well. If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e. http://foobub.com/?s=cats If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most likely: http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20... If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you: http://foobub.com/?s=foobub My website is not yet self-aware. No need to…

It is unfortunate that doing so takes you away from the site (I imagine the basic use case right now is to type in a bunch of queries to see what it displays.)

Ideally, it would show Google search results in an iframe, although I imagine that is against their TOS. Maybe just linking to Google search results would be a better experience.

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#25

Post by drhayes9 »

vu0tran wrote: post #13
clone1018 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, thank you! Much more usable now, there's also a couple other markup changes that need to be done, planning on open sourcing this?

Yeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.

Try open sourcing it before it gets unshitty.

I'm trying it myself, just putting things out there and saying "to hell with it" because, ultimately, unshitifying things is Zeno's paradox kind of work; you're never really done. And, really, it's probably better than you think anyway.

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#26

Post by vu0tran »

kami8845 wrote: post #24

Hey, what does the backend look like?

Hi, since there seems to be a lot of interest, I figured I could answer all of them at once in a blog post which I'll post sometime tomorrow.

To answer your question though, the backend is running on Python. There's no particular reason. I just find it a lot easier to script with. It's running on fCGI with nginx on the backend server. On the front is PHP... which is served through up by apache. I find it easier for me to do $_GET, hack around forms really fast and also just echo Javascript everywhere.

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#27

Post by clone1018 »

drhayes9 wrote: post #25
vu0tran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.

Try open sourcing it before it gets unshitty. I'm trying it myself, just putting things out there and saying "to hell with it" because, ultimately, unshitifying things is Zeno's paradox kind of work; you're never really done. And, really, it's probably better than you think anyway.

The urge to move his tags from under the tags is killing me D:

Re: I made a 'search engine' for fun

#29

Post by DividesByZero »

tomasien wrote: post #4
vu0tran wrote: post #2

The website isn't meant to be used for any real utility. What I wanted to demonstrate was just an alternate way to look at search. I think we've just gotten so used to Google and its millions of results; I wondered, what would happen if I took that all away and presented only just a small handful of results?

That's kind of exactly what I saw, and despite the lack of utility, I was like "Oh! This is nice!"

Sometimes minimal is best. Then again, Google does have the 'I'm feeling lucky' button - maybe that ought to just display a few results for them?

Either way, nice experiment!

Post reply on HN