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Show HN: Find your competitors that Google can't
- samcheng 11y agoWe seem to have killed it (at least, my search terms resulted in an interminable loading screen). Please, people, lay off it while they can figure out some scaling!
- pmelendez 11y agoIt would be interesting to know how much traffic we need to estimate before submitting a website here, so creators can be prepared and warned.
- gabemart 11y agoStuff I've had on the front page before has received somewhere between 300-2000 simultaneous visitors, and between 10,000-80,000 total visits.
- cperciva 11y agoMy experience has been pretty close to that; if I hit #1 then the peak is usually around 500-1000 simultaneous visitors according to Google Analytics, and the total number of visits is around 30-40k. Being around the middle of the front page is around 200-300 simultaneous visitors, and a correspondingly lower number of total visits; I don't know if I've ever had less than 10k total visits from a front page link.
- mtmail 11y agoAnother project that posted their traffic numbers it got from being on the HN frontpage. Looks like 300 sessions/hour, 2000 total for them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072660
- richardbrevig 11y agoI'll report back once this is done. It's back up.
- josephmx 11y agoI got 8.5k in the first day of a post here, which was less popular than this post (I saw something like 150 sessions/minute when I peaked at #6)
- general_failure 11y agoWe got around 18k hits.
- richardbrevig 11y agoThat was bittersweet. Was on a small digital ocean droplet. Wasn't expecting such a large response, so I'm really happy. I've upgraded the droplet so hopefully everything continues to work now.
- dirkdk 11y agoSet up a Paypal Donate button so we can chip in for your hosting costs
- mastermojo 11y agoIts already set up as a software-as-a-service for $29 a month.
- 1arity 11y agoI am completely endorsing this. This is actually really good. I did 6 months of research, and came up with 120+ companies in the space and 20+ serious competitors, and in typing in a single, pretty poor, keyword approximation to the project, I discovered a new competitor using RivalSeek ( and all the others they listed I was aware of ( and they were in my 20 ) ). Dead set. How do you do this? Someone needs to back you. This works.
- mtmail 11y agoIt seems to return better results than alternative.to (or similar), crunchbase and angellist for the queries I tried.
- wpcoder 11y agoNo search results appear, how is this better than Google again?
- richardbrevig 11y agoTry again. Took a minute to reboot server.
- niuzeta 11y agoI think being in front-page of hacker news broke the site.
- richardbrevig 11y agoTemporarily. It's back up. :)
- spdionis 11y agoGood job, the service looks very nice. Unfortunately I didn't get a single relevant result for my query...
- richardbrevig 11y agoThanks for trying it out! What was your search query? I'd like to investigate why, if I may. :)
- bkmartin 11y agoPretty nice. When testing this out I was getting multiple entries of the same domain. Once I added it to my landscape there would be a couple more in the list and I couldn't get rid of them. Very interesting tool.
- richardbrevig 11y agoThanks for trying it out! To fix that issue (remove the duplicates), click twice on the keyword/checkbox at the top of the page beside "add search term." That will reload the list freshly from the server. The issue comes from a lag in updating your selection of relevance on the server, most likely caused by the demand being placed on the server right now. Thanks again. :)
- bkmartin 11y agoSeems to be quite popular right now. I really like the idea and the execution seems very solid from a UI standpoint. Best of luck. I will keep my eye on this to see where things go.
- johnnydoebk 11y agoHow does it work? Looks like David Blaine street magic. I'm getting pretty good results even if keywords are really poor.
- ychantit 11y agoReally nice app I got good results. Can I ask you a question : How are you doing to get website traffic for competitors ?
- middleman90 11y ago"Using data from Alexa, we're able to compare estimated website traffic for each company" from their blog https://rivalseek.com/blog/2015/07/01/dollar-shave-club-competitors-razor-shaving-landscape/ https://rivalseek.com/blog/2015/07/01/dollar-shave-club-comp...
- ychantit 11y agoThank you. Is this data free ? How reliable you think it is ?
- cstavish 11y agoThis is really good. Turned up some extremely relevant yet non-obvious results.
- richardbrevig 11y agoThanks. I'm glad it worked for you. :)
- mangeletti 11y agoThis is really cool! I had suggested a different solution to the same problem @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778766 I really like the solution that RivalSeek created, and it removes the lag of a Q&A format.
- dmarlow 11y agoDoesn't seem to be loading for me.
- richardbrevig 11y agoThanks for trying it out! :) I just re-wrote some of the code that's made it 2x more efficient, so it shouldn't freeze now. Try it again.
- esistgut 11y agoDoesn't show anything next to the big "Is this a company you'd like to compare?" arrow. As for other recent threads on HN maybe it is time to rewrite something with Rust... ;-)
- richardbrevig 11y agolol, I'm getting ready to re-write a lot of it. Just rewrote some parts of it and it seems like it's getting things back under control. It's lagging a little but not freezing. Just made these changes a couple minutes ago. So try your search again. If it's still not showing anything, your search phrase may be too specific. :) Thanks for trying it!
- philliphaydon 11y agoI have no competitors. I think. Or its broken. On mobile so will try tomorrow. Hope it works. Love the idea.
- avalaunch 11y agoSite doesn't appear to be loading right now. Can anyone tell me what the site does? Thanks.
- richardbrevig 11y agoIt's back up again. Try it now. :)
- richardbrevig 11y agoHello, thanks for checking it out. You can see a 30-second video of the app here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TEgUb33sU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TEgUb33sU 1) enter search term 2) identify competitors 3) view information on competitors I've had to take the site down temporarily again to resize the disk space (it actually ran out of space!). The prior times I only increased RAM/CPU so it'd be quick. I'll post again once it's back up! :)
- cenal 11y agoHelped me determine that no one is doing what we are up to at my startup. First to market as far as we know. Platform launches on August 30th but you can sign up early at http://www.joinjune.com http://www.joinjune.com if you want to be assured of being in the beta.
- vertis 11y ago[positive helpful] You're not really competing against just 'pay people to speak to recruiters though'. You're competing against any recruiting platform or professional network (e.g linked in). You have to consider them for many reasons -- e.g. if you have any success, your more established competitors are well positioned to add that functionality. Doing a keyword search for 'recruiting platform' and 'professional network' turns up plenty of potential competitors. [/positive helpful]
- xasos 11y agoWow this works great! I tested it on a few random company ideas I had, and it returned very relevant potential competitors.
- ch4s3 11y agoSeems to be a little lacking for companies in health IT.
- richardbrevig 11y agoFor what category? What was your search query? I put together a landscape for a friend the other day and within an hour had identified the top 100 electronic health record/electronic medical record vendors. :)
- sosuke 11y agoI'd love to be able to provide you with a few competitors that I already know of and then have you give me back the ones I missed. Cool product!
- mangeletti 11y agoI had to try it: http://cl.ly/image/1c3X1h2D0z1S http://cl.ly/image/1c3X1h2D0z1S https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=find+competitors https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=find+compe... It seems there is a pretty major bug (see the results and their domains), but nonetheless RivalSeek is apparently supposed to be at the top, which if natural (not hard-coded), is pretty cool.
- tomkwok 11y agoAnd Google's competitors are ... Googles. > google.com.my, google.com.tj, google.com.sl, google.ac ... https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=google https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=google
- chinathrow 11y ago"By clicking "sign up," you agree to your credit card immediately being charged $29." So far so good. How about terms and conditions and a privacy policy? People would love to know what you do with their data before one signs up. You could be selling search terms to rivals... ;)
- fiatjaf 11y agoYou believe those?
- rootedbox 11y agoYou would think that "rivalseek.com" would appear at the top of a search for "seek rivals"
- tobltobs 11y agoGreat results. I thought I would know all my competitors, but I missed at least 30%. I would love to know how you are doing it (so I could try to rival you ...)
- tobltobs 11y agoDid try another search with "pdf compress". There are a lot of pages showing up with a "Free Downloads" title. They are all false positives I think. However, there are still mostly relevant pages, some I did not know before...
- bliti 11y agoAPI available? It would be nice and reduce resource usage due to people not having to crawl the page. If you need help building the api let me know
- bbali 11y agoHow are the search results sorted? I expect them to be sorted by size of the competitor, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
- andymcsherry 11y agoSo I entered HipChat, and it told me HipChat, Atlassian, Jira and Bitbucket were our competitors...
- richardbrevig 11y agoHello Andy, thanks for giving it a spin! Searching for "HipChat" will find companies that have a relationship with HipChat. If you're looking for HipChat competitors, I suggest searching for something like "private group chat" instead. Sorry this wasn't very clear, I'm going to try changing the search form a little to make it more intuitive. Thanks again for the feedback. :) Edit: Would this placeholder text in the search box be more clear? "search by keywords..." Thanks.
- andymcsherry 11y agoThat kind of worked, 1 was HipChat, 1 was somewhat relevant, 2 were social networking products and the last was "Free XXX Webcam Chat, Sex Cams and live swingers"
- hanniabu 11y agoFound some issues. Idk if it's because it ran out of suggestions or what, but when I did my search and then stayed going through the suggestions to refine the newer suggestions, I fairly quickly got to the point where there were repay suggestions. However this was not the problem. The problem is that when I hit the not relevant button, it went away as it should, but when the duplicates came up and I hot the not relevant button again, the button would get highlighted but no action was taken. Didn't realize the issue was because they were duplicates until after I noticed it happening with a few more I recognized. Edit: Overall, seems really great so far. And I forget what tags I search, but I was typing in obscure combinations where I didn't think I'd get any hits
- richardbrevig 11y agoThanks for trying it out, and I'm glad you like it overall! One of the great things about RivalSeek is that it only shows you a competitor suggestion once. After you've decided relevant/not relevant, you won't see it again. If you subscribe, it will keep this memory and only alert you of new potential competitors it's not shown you before. The issue you describe is because of a lag between your browser and the server. To fix it: click on the search term with the checkbox twice (by the "add search term" link). That will manually pull a fresh suggestion list from the server. Sorry for this bug, should have it fixed soon. And thanks for your comment! :)
- vertis 11y agoIt's an interesting idea, though I'd rather put in company names than keywords and have you tell me who is working in the space. For example, if I search with a variety Real Estate keywords I can't seem to make Zillow, Trulia, RightMove, Realtor, Zoopla, auction.com, realestate.com.au, casa.it all come up together (and these are just a handful of the "portals" I know exist and are definitely competitors).