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Hi HN, I’m the creator of Ninfex. I’ve been unhappy with the inconsistent quality of web search results for quite some time now. Wanting to do something about

Hi HN, I’m the creator of Ninfex. I’ve been unhappy with the inconsistent quality of web search results for quite some time now. Wanting to do something about this for myself, I started experimenting with the way I save my notes/bookmarks. In all of my trials, two things seemed to work more than all others and proved to be useful in the long term. One: saving my good search result URLs. Two: saving links to discussions on those URLs from Reddit, HN, Lobsters, etc. because in my opinion, community feedback is a (relatively) better proxy for URL quality. This combined with the Apple notes search feature became a very simple but effective personal index. For the main topics that interest me, I often found myself searching my index before searching the web. Once this setup started working well for me, I thought it was probably time to add a feature which lets users vote on URLs and host a version of this online, so others can both contribute to and benefit from it. With that in mind, I started speaking to more people who were unhappy with the current state of search. Turns out the most common workaround people use is restricting results to communities (mostly reddit) either by just appending the name or using site: operator (example - bone conduction headphones reddit). This was further confirmation that the so-called “power users” had already moved on to relying on using communities as a proxy for their search results. And so I built a basic version of Ninfex with all those features: community-curated index, votable urls, forum links and search. It’s an early stage prototype and I’m slowly populating the index with URLs from my personal wiki. I look forward to your feedback and I’m open to all kinds of suggestions.

kieckerjan 5y ago
I like the idea very much. First question that comes to mind though is: how gameable is this system?
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Honestly, I'm not very sure myself and I'll have to wait and see. The votes could be gamed perhaps (multiple accounts etc.), but I could restrict voting capabilities to say, email/phone verified accounts, aged accounts or minimum karma (or a combination of all those). Like I said, we'll have to see how it evolves.
  - meowster 5y ago
    Aged accounts won't stop anything, and Karma probably won't stop anything (afterall a person can buy karma-farmed reddit accounts), and I'm not going to give a phone number to try the service out. I hope you figure it out, and I wish you success.
    - eitland 5y ago
      > Aged accounts won't stop anything You state this like an obvious, well know fact or a law of nature. I don't think it is any of those. Furthermore there is more advanced solutions like connecting to other accounts like at least one service did (name slips my mind): paste this proof in your Twitter (or HN, or reddit or stackoverflow or whatever) bio and type your twitter (or whatever) handle here and we will verify it. Yes, people can sell their accounts but there are only so many active 10 year old twitter, HN, reddit accounts ib good standing (and once they are used they are used). Once it actually get a little bit hard people will start to care more about their accounts. Oh, and for a single individual it gets hard fast.
duncanwerner 5y ago
This looks very much like the old site del.icio.us (which was bought by yahoo and discarded). Don't bother going there but see [wikipedia][1]. The trick there was that it was originally a "personal bookmarking" service, so there was a selfish reason for individual users to submit + curate links. Search got layered on top later. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  Just read through the features of del.icio.us on wikipedia, you are right about the overlaps. I suspect that coupling community + search from the start, might result in different outcomes (both positive and negative) as opposed to say just community. Take reddit for example, it's all about the community, the search is abysmal. But it's fun to imagine what if reddit was mainly about search and the community was a bonus. Surely a balance needs to be struck.
- alex_young 5y ago
  Also quite a lot like the original Yahoo right?
searchnit 5y ago
Interesting project. One UI nit: I clicked on Mathematics and the top submission at the time was: https://ninfex.com/item?id=sVfpxepq4rNQ https://ninfex.com/item?id=sVfpxepq4rNQ The search UI says: "5 days ago." I thought it sounded odd since I missed the discussion here 5 days ago and clicked through to discover the link leads to an HN discussion from 2014. So, that "5 days ago" refers to when it was "submitted" to Ninfex instead of any relevant time information on the actual submitted material. Felt a bit misled, and finding relevant current information over higher ranked older material is a painpoint for me in other search products. Happens when I am searching for information on a library and the most popular hits refer to information from years ago and the library from multiple major versions ago. Sometimes the answers are incompatible with the current state of the library and its API. These are different issues, but they feel orthogonal.
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  These are a valid issues that I will certainly resolve, thanks for pointing them out.
Grimm1 5y ago
This is awesome, we were doing the same thing for a bit at first but ultimately moved away from it in favor of focusing on a product more in our wheel house, but I think this has a lot of potential to be very big. Very much rooting for you! One thought we had that was different was to let users create communities but auto populate the communities with links that we've crawled, to solve the link gaming issue. And then let them choose how things would be ranked and curate the links we auto populated.
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Interesting thought!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lettergram 5y ago
Howdy, you might find this interesting -- I effectively automated this by tracking people and what they link. https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
benrbray 5y ago
I love the idea! I have a UI suggestion: There is way too much wasted space. Information density is crucial for a search engine. It should be possible to see 20-30 results at a time without scrolling, at least on desktop. Right now only 2.5 results fit on my screen. Use the design of HN as a model!
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  You are right about info. density. I will try to make it better. Thanks for the feedback.
rapnie 5y ago
This is a really nice project. Along with the crowdsourcing nature an open and FOSS approach is a good fit. Do you consider open-sourcing?
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  Thanks rapnie. Someone else asked about that too. I'm not sure, I haven't thought about it. In your opinion, what would be the pros vs cons of having it either way?
  - laurent123456 5y ago
    If you don't plan to sell access to your search engine, having it open source means people can help you improve it. Open source is also better to get initial users (who will come from here, Reddit, etc. mostly technical people who care about software being open source).
    - zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
      Oh that clarifies it. Thanks for explaining.
Ontol 5y ago
Year ago, by the same reason, I started to work on project http://ontol.org/ http://ontol.org/ Happy to see, that I am not alone
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
  That's awesome!
sdwr 5y ago
Site looks good, but feels unfocused. Asking people to submit and tag a bunch of links doesn't feel like a viable jumping off point, and I don't think people are seriously going to use your custom search on your custom pool of links. If it is supposed to be a bookmarking tool, look at pinboard. That's a proper tool, rooted in the solo experience. Save bookmarks between devices, great. The community aspect comes a distant second. If this is supposed to replace googling "reddit x", it has to add something to googling "reddit x"! There is a constant flow of people googling "reddit headphones", opening the top couple links from r/headphones, then leaving. To capture some of that traffic you need to improve upon that experience. I really like the backlinking from reddit/HN/etc. Try expanding on that - make your site a destination for AFTER people visit the reddit thread. Reddit threads lock after 6 months or whatever. If you add comments and the ability to merge similar links, I could see it working as an afterparty site.

kieckerjan 5y ago

I like the idea very much. First question that comes to mind though is: how gameable is this system?

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Honestly, I'm not very sure myself and I'll have to wait and see. The votes could be gamed perhaps (multiple accounts etc.), but I could restrict voting capabilities to say, email/phone verified accounts, aged accounts or minimum karma (or a combination of all those). Like I said, we'll have to see how it evolves.
- meowster 5y ago
  Aged accounts won't stop anything, and Karma probably won't stop anything (afterall a person can buy karma-farmed reddit accounts), and I'm not going to give a phone number to try the service out. I hope you figure it out, and I wish you success.
  - eitland 5y ago
    > Aged accounts won't stop anything You state this like an obvious, well know fact or a law of nature. I don't think it is any of those. Furthermore there is more advanced solutions like connecting to other accounts like at least one service did (name slips my mind): paste this proof in your Twitter (or HN, or reddit or stackoverflow or whatever) bio and type your twitter (or whatever) handle here and we will verify it. Yes, people can sell their accounts but there are only so many active 10 year old twitter, HN, reddit accounts ib good standing (and once they are used they are used). Once it actually get a little bit hard people will start to care more about their accounts. Oh, and for a single individual it gets hard fast.

duncanwerner 5y ago

This looks very much like the old site del.icio.us (which was bought by yahoo and discarded). Don't bother going there but see [wikipedia][1]. The trick there was that it was originally a "personal bookmarking" service, so there was a selfish reason for individual users to submit + curate links. Search got layered on top later. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
Just read through the features of del.icio.us on wikipedia, you are right about the overlaps. I suspect that coupling community + search from the start, might result in different outcomes (both positive and negative) as opposed to say just community. Take reddit for example, it's all about the community, the search is abysmal. But it's fun to imagine what if reddit was mainly about search and the community was a bonus. Surely a balance needs to be struck.
alex_young 5y ago
Also quite a lot like the original Yahoo right?

searchnit 5y ago

Interesting project. One UI nit: I clicked on Mathematics and the top submission at the time was: https://ninfex.com/item?id=sVfpxepq4rNQ https://ninfex.com/item?id=sVfpxepq4rNQ The search UI says: "5 days ago." I thought it sounded odd since I missed the discussion here 5 days ago and clicked through to discover the link leads to an HN discussion from 2014. So, that "5 days ago" refers to when it was "submitted" to Ninfex instead of any relevant time information on the actual submitted material. Felt a bit misled, and finding relevant current information over higher ranked older material is a painpoint for me in other search products. Happens when I am searching for information on a library and the most popular hits refer to information from years ago and the library from multiple major versions ago. Sometimes the answers are incompatible with the current state of the library and its API. These are different issues, but they feel orthogonal.

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
These are a valid issues that I will certainly resolve, thanks for pointing them out.

Grimm1 5y ago

This is awesome, we were doing the same thing for a bit at first but ultimately moved away from it in favor of focusing on a product more in our wheel house, but I think this has a lot of potential to be very big. Very much rooting for you! One thought we had that was different was to let users create communities but auto populate the communities with links that we've crawled, to solve the link gaming issue. And then let them choose how things would be ranked and curate the links we auto populated.

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Interesting thought!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lettergram 5y ago

Howdy, you might find this interesting -- I effectively automated this by tracking people and what they link. https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

benrbray 5y ago

I love the idea! I have a UI suggestion: There is way too much wasted space. Information density is crucial for a search engine. It should be possible to see 20-30 results at a time without scrolling, at least on desktop. Right now only 2.5 results fit on my screen. Use the design of HN as a model!

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
You are right about info. density. I will try to make it better. Thanks for the feedback.

rapnie 5y ago

This is a really nice project. Along with the crowdsourcing nature an open and FOSS approach is a good fit. Do you consider open-sourcing?

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
Thanks rapnie. Someone else asked about that too. I'm not sure, I haven't thought about it. In your opinion, what would be the pros vs cons of having it either way?
- laurent123456 5y ago
  If you don't plan to sell access to your search engine, having it open source means people can help you improve it. Open source is also better to get initial users (who will come from here, Reddit, etc. mostly technical people who care about software being open source).
  - zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
    Oh that clarifies it. Thanks for explaining.

Ontol 5y ago

Year ago, by the same reason, I started to work on project http://ontol.org/ http://ontol.org/ Happy to see, that I am not alone

zeeshanqureshi 5y ago
That's awesome!

sdwr 5y ago

Site looks good, but feels unfocused. Asking people to submit and tag a bunch of links doesn't feel like a viable jumping off point, and I don't think people are seriously going to use your custom search on your custom pool of links. If it is supposed to be a bookmarking tool, look at pinboard. That's a proper tool, rooted in the solo experience. Save bookmarks between devices, great. The community aspect comes a distant second. If this is supposed to replace googling "reddit x", it has to add something to googling "reddit x"! There is a constant flow of people googling "reddit headphones", opening the top couple links from r/headphones, then leaving. To capture some of that traffic you need to improve upon that experience. I really like the backlinking from reddit/HN/etc. Try expanding on that - make your site a destination for AFTER people visit the reddit thread. Reddit threads lock after 6 months or whatever. If you add comments and the ability to merge similar links, I could see it working as an afterparty site.