6 ms·

Y Combinator Challenge #16 - A form of search that depends on design

12 points by jmorin007 18y ago

13ren 18y ago
It wouldn't open links in a new window (FF2, linux); and I could find no way to extract the URL of a found page. Cool design though. Expectation management: I felt delight at the effect, then disappointment that it didn't animate the it fully (maybe it's my low-power subnotebook though).
prakash 18y ago
The best articles on competing with Google are from Rich Skrenta: http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.html http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.htm... http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...
- tom234 18y ago
  Great article. Thanks.
jfornear 18y ago
No one ever seems to give any mention to Viewzi, a Dallas based visual search engine that is pretty awesome from both a design and technical standpoint. http://viewzi.com http://viewzi.com Even though Viewzi is still in beta, the overall apathy toward them from the tech crowd seems to point to the conclusion that maybe people don't really want a design oriented search experience. Regardless, good luck to Viewzi and others who feel called to create a new approach to search, but the bottom-line remains... Branding is key, and Google is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the world. In addition, even if you were to come up with some innovative new approach, Google or some random programmer with BOSS could easily implement similar features and render your hard work worthless. (see: Cuil) Search doesn't need fixed where it isn't broken. EDIT: I'm also tired of hearing people say that Google has no sense of design when it is one of the most well-designed sites on the web. There is an art to knowing what not to include, and Google does this better than anyone on the web.
- prakash 18y ago
  Wow, Viewzi is pretty cool, nice design. How did you hear of these guys?
  - jfornear 18y ago
    I was looking for an internship in Dallas and came across them. I was also confused as to why I had not heard of them since I follow tech news religiously and go to school in Dallas at SMU. Apparently, their CEO sold his first company to Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com before it was sold to Yahoo. If they were based in Silicon Valley, I bet everyone would have already known about them, and the hype would be through the roof. I was really boggled by the way all the tech journalists overlooked Viewzi during that whole Cuil debacle.
  - kleneway 18y ago
    These guys were on net@night a few weeks back: http://www.twit.tv/natn59 http://www.twit.tv/natn59
- wensing 18y ago
  I am not finding Viewzi to be very intuitive. This is not what I expect from a search results page: http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking What am I supposed to do next?
  - jfornear 18y ago
    You choose a 'view' depending on where you want the results pulled from and how you want it to be displayed. I agree, it isn't very intuitive, but only because it's different than Google, which is what we have been used to for so long.
    - wensing 18y ago
      It's not only because it's different than Google, it's because it's not explained, i.e. they make a poor assumption: namely, that the interface they're presenting contains enough information for me to make a good decision. I don't find that's the case. I find it hard to choose between "Web Screenshot View (Searches Yahoo)" or "4 Sources View (Searches Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo)". I really have never thought about it. Just give me the results in your best guess format, and I'll take it from there if I'm unsatisfied. Also, the need to move really far through horizontal space to explore all the different views is ungood. Small multiples, if you want to call these that, should be placed in a grid, not a long single-file line.
tom234 18y ago
This UI design is critical to search engine is just nonsense. All that matters in search engine is the result. You can have the crappiest interface and the best result, you will become billionaire. Simple as that. Design in search engine doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the result.
- arockwell 18y ago
  Design matters because I need to be able to interpret the search engines results as quickly as possible. Google's lightweight design really shines because it loads instantly and I can usually look through the result page very quickly and figure out which link is the most relevant to my query and click on it. However, that's not always true, and I sometimes have to click on 3 or 4 links to figure out if I need to refine my search or not. If someone found a better way to organize the search results, so that I can determine which ones are relevant faster that would be a big win. I do agree with you that the quality of the search results are a lot more important though, but presentation definitely does matter.
tom234 18y ago
I wanted to post a general discussion going about creating a search engine since the Ycombinator crowd is a good crowd. How do you guys see Google scaling in comparison with how the web is expanding so much? Do you think they will keep indexing the web and adding new content? I personally don't see that to be very scalable. What do you think Google is thinking about the future in terms of incorporating so many webpages into its index. Obviously Google is using a "pull" mechanism where it crawls and indexes. Do you guys see like "push" mechanism like RSS that will work better and how would that affect the search result? Is there any way besides index to achieve a different kind of search engine? Another kind of content retrieval system is like the Digg where the user "pushes" the content to Digg and therefore it is supposedly more relevant and interesting, but the disadvantage of that becoming a search engine is there isn't a lot of content that the user submits compared with like Google. For instance Digg cannot support query like "c# string replace" while Google will do that very easily because it crawled and indexed the MSDN api pages already, while Digg users might never submit that same page to Digg. My main concern is supporting so many content with different query and being very comprehensive search engine like Google without this huge index and crawling restriction? Any clues? I'm not dreaming about this and I actually want to make it a reality somehow.
- kleneway 18y ago
  In my opinion, yes, Google will keep crawling the web and indexing in a similar (but continually optimized) way for the foreseeable future. Here's why - let's say you work at Google and come up with an entirely new way to do search. Here are your options: 1 - Go to Larry/Sergi with the proposal to completely rip and replace millions/billions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge in favor of a completely unproven new idea. The cost and risk are so huge they'd never go for it. 2 - Go to an outside investor with the proposal to build it from scratch. If it's truly an amazing, innovative new approach, they might fund it and you'd be able to build it from scratch without the political nightmare of trying to rewrite the core product of a multi-billion dollar public company. This is exactly what both the Cuil and FriendFeed guys did (and yes, FriendFeed is very, very, very much a Google competitor). One thing I always think about is in 100 years (or 1000 years), will we still be opening a web browser, typing a few words into the same plain Google text box, and hitting the "Search" button to get a page with 20 blue links and a bunch of ads? I doubt it. So there's definitely a better way to do search, we just haven't discovered it. My personal opinion is that some combination of social search (i.e. FriendFeed) plus human-powered search (i.e. Wikia/Mahalo) plus semantic search (PowerSet) will be involved in the next evolution. Of course, if I knew exactly what that looked like, I'd be on a beach right now instead of hanging out here on Hacker News. :)

12 points by jmorin007 18y ago

13ren 18y ago

It wouldn't open links in a new window (FF2, linux); and I could find no way to extract the URL of a found page. Cool design though. Expectation management: I felt delight at the effect, then disappointment that it didn't animate the it fully (maybe it's my low-power subnotebook though).

prakash 18y ago

The best articles on competing with Google are from Rich Skrenta: http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.html http://www.skrenta.com/2007/03/how_to_beat_google_part_1.htm... http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_t.html http://www.skrenta.com/2007/01/winnertakeall_google_and_the_...

tom234 18y ago
Great article. Thanks.

jfornear 18y ago

No one ever seems to give any mention to Viewzi, a Dallas based visual search engine that is pretty awesome from both a design and technical standpoint. http://viewzi.com http://viewzi.com Even though Viewzi is still in beta, the overall apathy toward them from the tech crowd seems to point to the conclusion that maybe people don't really want a design oriented search experience. Regardless, good luck to Viewzi and others who feel called to create a new approach to search, but the bottom-line remains... Branding is key, and Google is one of the most well-known and trusted brands in the world. In addition, even if you were to come up with some innovative new approach, Google or some random programmer with BOSS could easily implement similar features and render your hard work worthless. (see: Cuil) Search doesn't need fixed where it isn't broken. EDIT: I'm also tired of hearing people say that Google has no sense of design when it is one of the most well-designed sites on the web. There is an art to knowing what not to include, and Google does this better than anyone on the web.

prakash 18y ago
Wow, Viewzi is pretty cool, nice design. How did you hear of these guys?
- jfornear 18y ago
  I was looking for an internship in Dallas and came across them. I was also confused as to why I had not heard of them since I follow tech news religiously and go to school in Dallas at SMU. Apparently, their CEO sold his first company to Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com before it was sold to Yahoo. If they were based in Silicon Valley, I bet everyone would have already known about them, and the hype would be through the roof. I was really boggled by the way all the tech journalists overlooked Viewzi during that whole Cuil debacle.
- kleneway 18y ago
  These guys were on net@night a few weeks back: http://www.twit.tv/natn59 http://www.twit.tv/natn59
wensing 18y ago
I am not finding Viewzi to be very intuitive. This is not what I expect from a search results page: http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking http://www.viewzi.com/search/hurricane%20tracking What am I supposed to do next?
- jfornear 18y ago
  You choose a 'view' depending on where you want the results pulled from and how you want it to be displayed. I agree, it isn't very intuitive, but only because it's different than Google, which is what we have been used to for so long.
  - wensing 18y ago
    It's not only because it's different than Google, it's because it's not explained, i.e. they make a poor assumption: namely, that the interface they're presenting contains enough information for me to make a good decision. I don't find that's the case. I find it hard to choose between "Web Screenshot View (Searches Yahoo)" or "4 Sources View (Searches Ask, Google, MSN, Yahoo)". I really have never thought about it. Just give me the results in your best guess format, and I'll take it from there if I'm unsatisfied. Also, the need to move really far through horizontal space to explore all the different views is ungood. Small multiples, if you want to call these that, should be placed in a grid, not a long single-file line.

tom234 18y ago

This UI design is critical to search engine is just nonsense. All that matters in search engine is the result. You can have the crappiest interface and the best result, you will become billionaire. Simple as that. Design in search engine doesn't matter at all. All that matters is the result.

arockwell 18y ago
Design matters because I need to be able to interpret the search engines results as quickly as possible. Google's lightweight design really shines because it loads instantly and I can usually look through the result page very quickly and figure out which link is the most relevant to my query and click on it. However, that's not always true, and I sometimes have to click on 3 or 4 links to figure out if I need to refine my search or not. If someone found a better way to organize the search results, so that I can determine which ones are relevant faster that would be a big win. I do agree with you that the quality of the search results are a lot more important though, but presentation definitely does matter.

tom234 18y ago

I wanted to post a general discussion going about creating a search engine since the Ycombinator crowd is a good crowd. How do you guys see Google scaling in comparison with how the web is expanding so much? Do you think they will keep indexing the web and adding new content? I personally don't see that to be very scalable. What do you think Google is thinking about the future in terms of incorporating so many webpages into its index. Obviously Google is using a "pull" mechanism where it crawls and indexes. Do you guys see like "push" mechanism like RSS that will work better and how would that affect the search result? Is there any way besides index to achieve a different kind of search engine? Another kind of content retrieval system is like the Digg where the user "pushes" the content to Digg and therefore it is supposedly more relevant and interesting, but the disadvantage of that becoming a search engine is there isn't a lot of content that the user submits compared with like Google. For instance Digg cannot support query like "c# string replace" while Google will do that very easily because it crawled and indexed the MSDN api pages already, while Digg users might never submit that same page to Digg. My main concern is supporting so many content with different query and being very comprehensive search engine like Google without this huge index and crawling restriction? Any clues? I'm not dreaming about this and I actually want to make it a reality somehow.

kleneway 18y ago
In my opinion, yes, Google will keep crawling the web and indexing in a similar (but continually optimized) way for the foreseeable future. Here's why - let's say you work at Google and come up with an entirely new way to do search. Here are your options: 1 - Go to Larry/Sergi with the proposal to completely rip and replace millions/billions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge in favor of a completely unproven new idea. The cost and risk are so huge they'd never go for it. 2 - Go to an outside investor with the proposal to build it from scratch. If it's truly an amazing, innovative new approach, they might fund it and you'd be able to build it from scratch without the political nightmare of trying to rewrite the core product of a multi-billion dollar public company. This is exactly what both the Cuil and FriendFeed guys did (and yes, FriendFeed is very, very, very much a Google competitor). One thing I always think about is in 100 years (or 1000 years), will we still be opening a web browser, typing a few words into the same plain Google text box, and hitting the "Search" button to get a page with 20 blue links and a bunch of ads? I doubt it. So there's definitely a better way to do search, we just haven't discovered it. My personal opinion is that some combination of social search (i.e. FriendFeed) plus human-powered search (i.e. Wikia/Mahalo) plus semantic search (PowerSet) will be involved in the next evolution. Of course, if I knew exactly what that looked like, I'd be on a beach right now instead of hanging out here on Hacker News. :)