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Hi Kevin! Glad somebody else has a shared interest in this problem. Sears.com is a very difficult problem to solve. The "category madness" you bring up certa

Hi Kevin! Glad somebody else has a shared interest in this problem. Sears.com is a very difficult problem to solve. The "category madness" you bring up certainly is a very good point, and I rely on the wisdom of crowds to mitigate this issue. After a site has been tagged thousands of times, I'm assuming that the unique description of the site is pretty good. However, there is a slight "snowball effect" present with my dataset (delicious): When a URL is first tagged, those tags are suggested to all future people who bookmark it, causing the initial set of tags to have more bias. At any rate, back to sears.com. The current matches now are all stores, but they're not at specific as you suggest they could be. Moreofit offers a "tag filter" feature, and a tag signature matching feature for this occasion. Of course, it all depends on the user being savvy enough to use these things. On moreofit, you can specify tags and how important they are for your search. Try these results to see what I mean: http://bit.ly/cVXgED http://bit.ly/cVXgED I agree that it will never be a "killer app," however, I do think it pretty useful and a preliminary search on Google shows a lot of interest in searches for "sites like chatroulette" and "sites like XXX". I'm hoping to serve those customers' needs. The bookmarklet is coming soon -- and subdomain hell isn't a big issue -- search the subdomain first, if no matches, then the main domain.

notahacker 16y ago
The problem with searches for "sites like xx" is that people entering those search strings are likely to be fairly unsophisticated users (who aren't aware of the "similar" button or related: syntax, let alone the possibility of there being dedicated sites for that kind of search). Moreofit.com looks more like a power user tool. The other problem is that Google's results for the suggested "sites like" queries are pretty helpful - they generally return articles and q&a pages with exactly the lists the end users are looking for. It might require more clicks to get there, but even the non-savvy user should be able to managed it. I was impressed by the results returned by moreofit though, especially for websites that don't have numerous linkbait articles about "Top 10 websites for ....". The tag importance sliders are especially neat, though one minor usability issue is that the update button (bottom right) is a long way away from the sliders and the text advising you to click it. The Google display ads returned when you do a URL search are horrendously irrelevant and probably deter users from clicking on the targeted text ads above them.
- photon_off 16y ago
  I'm trying to make it so a search for "sites like bla" would bring me somewhere near the top, with a link to "top ten sites like bla" which I feel would appeal well to these users. Google's results for these searches are OK. I've noticed it takes a substantial amount of time to scan through the links and figure out which forum posts might contain some good information. When clicking through, sometimes I'd find good suggestions, sometimes not. It's a similar experience if you search for some obscure error code and end up scouring a few pages to find out how somebody else solved it (sometimes in one of those god awful non-threaded 1-comment-per-page bulletin boards -- how do they still exist?). I'll work on fixing that update button issue. If there's one thing I noticed, it's that hardly anybody has used the "tag sliders" feature, or any other search options for that matter. They're either content enough, or don't care enough, to delve further into results. From a technology standpoint, I find the tag sliders feature to be really exciting. You can craft your own URL and see if anything matches it. The horrendous Google Ads are something out of my control -- Google won't allow me to supply the keywords for the page, and if they haven't indexed the page yet, they'll show crappy generic horoscope ads. I need suggestions as to how to get more relevant ads up there. Perhaps an ad service that allows me to supply the keywords. Know of any? And, of course, thanks for the feedback.

notahacker 16y ago

The problem with searches for "sites like xx" is that people entering those search strings are likely to be fairly unsophisticated users (who aren't aware of the "similar" button or related: syntax, let alone the possibility of there being dedicated sites for that kind of search). Moreofit.com looks more like a power user tool. The other problem is that Google's results for the suggested "sites like" queries are pretty helpful - they generally return articles and q&a pages with exactly the lists the end users are looking for. It might require more clicks to get there, but even the non-savvy user should be able to managed it. I was impressed by the results returned by moreofit though, especially for websites that don't have numerous linkbait articles about "Top 10 websites for ....". The tag importance sliders are especially neat, though one minor usability issue is that the update button (bottom right) is a long way away from the sliders and the text advising you to click it. The Google display ads returned when you do a URL search are horrendously irrelevant and probably deter users from clicking on the targeted text ads above them.

photon_off 16y ago
I'm trying to make it so a search for "sites like bla" would bring me somewhere near the top, with a link to "top ten sites like bla" which I feel would appeal well to these users. Google's results for these searches are OK. I've noticed it takes a substantial amount of time to scan through the links and figure out which forum posts might contain some good information. When clicking through, sometimes I'd find good suggestions, sometimes not. It's a similar experience if you search for some obscure error code and end up scouring a few pages to find out how somebody else solved it (sometimes in one of those god awful non-threaded 1-comment-per-page bulletin boards -- how do they still exist?). I'll work on fixing that update button issue. If there's one thing I noticed, it's that hardly anybody has used the "tag sliders" feature, or any other search options for that matter. They're either content enough, or don't care enough, to delve further into results. From a technology standpoint, I find the tag sliders feature to be really exciting. You can craft your own URL and see if anything matches it. The horrendous Google Ads are something out of my control -- Google won't allow me to supply the keywords for the page, and if they haven't indexed the page yet, they'll show crappy generic horoscope ads. I need suggestions as to how to get more relevant ads up there. Perhaps an ad service that allows me to supply the keywords. Know of any? And, of course, thanks for the feedback.