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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?

#21

Post by nostrademons »

I'm actually pretty impressed. Searched for "Epigram" first and it came up with the programming language as the first result, along with Conor's homepage. Searched for "Arya Stark" and it came up with the Westeros fan wiki and Wikipedia entry. Searched for Hacker News, and the site was the first hit. Searched for my name (a tough one, since lots of people share it), and came up with my FriendFeed page, Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours, and a support question I left on the webfaction forum.

Couple comments:

What's with the Wink and PeopleFinder links? Partnerships? They're almost never what I want, and putting them up top is distracting.

The AJAX-load-more-results-on-scroll feature is cool, but I found it a little jerky and distracting. This could be because just hold down the down arrow, so I go really fast and often hit the end of the page while it's loading. Any way to make the transition a little smoother, maybe by preloading results and only displaying them as you scroll, maybe by a fade or slide transition?

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

#22

Post by nostrademons »

colinplamondon wrote: post #16

Highly relevant results for the band I entered, but not enough to make me want to switch from Google. It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't great - there's nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.

I wonder if search has become a commodity, and the reason why Google dominates isn't because of its search engine, it's because of its brand name. Search actually seems a lot like the food industry in that you can't really judge the quality of the product beyond a certain level, yet you care deeply about that quality. Those industries usually tend to become branding plays, not technology plays.

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

#23

Post by siong1987 »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #20
prakash wrote: post #11

What motivated you to create this search engine? Google/other search engines did not come up with relevant results?

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 engine is really awkward. And, the logo is really too colorful. It seems like a side-project more than a serious project. Anyway, it displayed the results that I expected.

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

#24

Post by epi0Bauqu »

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…

Thanks for the feedback. I would very much like it to be a "tool" as you describe. I've gone through many design iterations, and have tried to keep the "clutter" down to a minimum.

I would be interested to know what specific design elements you think are contributing to this problem. I know you said it isn't really a design problem, but there has to be more to say about it :) Colors? The results on the right?

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

#27

Post by Jasber »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
colinplamondon wrote: post #16

Highly relevant results for the band I entered, but not enough to make me want to switch from Google. It's not that you aren't good, it's just that you aren't great - there's nothing here that would make me want to purposefully break a habit formed over the past seven odd years. Namely, using Google.

I wonder if search has become a commodity, and the reason why Google dominates isn't because of its search engine, it's because of its brand name. Search actually seems a lot like the food industry in that you can't really judge the quality of the product beyond a certain level, yet you care deeply about that quality. Those industries usually tend to become branding plays, not technology plays.

Google's brand does influence its search results. I recall the MSN Live team put the Google logo above their results and people automatically perceived them as more relevant even though the results had not changed.

After much Googling the closest I could come to finding the article was here (at the bottom): http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3601751

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

#28

Post by jstabbac »

It's annoying. My train of thought when I got there: Good, clean simple interface. Funny name. This text box is huge. I don't know if that's good or bad Everythings scrunched up at the top. I have plenty of vertical room, use it. I'll search for something... alright why is there a loading bar for a search engine? This is frusturating having to wait for my results What? Only 4? This 'load more results' thing is fairly annoying, just load them for me I'll try something else... say 'blue wallpaper' *Oh how handy, I'm at Google now.

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

#29

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

I like the fact that results are returned by relevance and categorization. However, the lack of visual cues between categories is rather harsh to follow. I think if you were to have a sightly grey background for each category with whitespace between, things would be much easier to look at and comprehend. Otherwise, the results were, for the most part, great.
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