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

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

#131

Post by raju »

Pretty impressive. I did a few searches (including my name, and the name of a person I knew about a decade ago, Ruby etc) and am definitely impressed with the resultset.

I do agree with the others that the UI could be done a little better, including the colors (a little too vibrant for me) and the name. I don't really care about the home page, since I dont remember the last time I went to Google's homepage.

Once I like a search engine that consistently gives me good results, using FF's Keyword search is the way to go.

All in all, great work, and I certainly wish you luck.

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

#132

Post by JulianMorrison »

trominos wrote: post #90

Your engine actually seems superior to Google in some ways, which is fantastic. I've always wondered if a single person could do something technologically novel in search; you seem to have done so. I wouldn't be surprised if your engine opens the doors to real, widespread innovation in search. Your UI isn't great, though. Some unordered points: • Your name is bad. • Your text is too big. • The whole thing feels too u…

The name is good. Memorable.

The text is exactly right for a different way of looking at search results - like a little generated topical page rather than like a list of links.

Unprofessional is good! Professional = boring. Altavista was "professional".

Four good results is enough.

You aren't getting the whole "looks like a topical page" thing. The mixed sources of results are evidently nondistinct for a reason!

Yeah, the highlight is annoying. Breaks the unified flow.

Arrows are hints evidently copied from Wikipedia. It goes with the design and it's a visual hint they link off-site. Makes sense to me! Moreover, it made such immediate visual sense i didn't even see them as distinct elements until you described them.

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

#136

Post by bigthboy »

I like the concept of it but the layout of the results page is...well... not so good. I, like others, was impressed by the results I got for my search, but it was hard to tell what I was looking at for a minute. I didn't instantly know that what I was looking at was in a certain category and so on and so forth. It looked more like a bunch of random text about X topic thrown up on the page in an unstructured manner with hyperlinks to who knows where. I think with a little bit of work on structuring the results that it will be a pretty decent system. Not that I see it rocking the foundation of Google anytime soon, but that doesn't mean Microsoft ;-) they are only 6% after all.

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

#137

Post by zhyder »

okeumeni wrote: post #135
mynameishere wrote: post #44

I really need to see the URLs for hits.

Great work! One more thing I think is necessary, you should clearly mention in the about page that you are feeding from Yahoo search result as well. It is fair to the user and to Yahoo.

Yahoo BOSS's terms do not require attribution though: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/ . I don't think most users would care as much either; we hackers care a lot coz we're baffled with "how in the world did this one guy do this?!". (Even with BOSS being used for some results, this is still very impressive.)

Although it might help the service get more credibility by mentioning that Yahoo results are also used.

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

#138

Post by iamdave »

PieSquared wrote: post #69
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.

If you click "more links" below the first few main links you'll see search results with URLS
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