3 ms·

My take after five minutes of playing with this is that it's big and I'll remember the day I saw it here. Congratulations, this is a remarkable offering right n

My take after five minutes of playing with this is that it's big and I'll remember the day I saw it here. Congratulations, this is a remarkable offering right now. I hit a user wall fast because the URL doesn't change to become something shareable. Think of it as the search engine contract: a search engine returns a tuple of (search-url, results) and while results may differ in detail because of personalization, the search-url is sharable and does the same operation everywhere. I fed three queries and the results are dramatically, noticeably, better than the Google top page. I'm sharing screenshots with people, not your site. This will spread like brushfire when your URLs work that way. I like where this is going, keep it up.

jedwhite 5y ago
As a coder, I don't think there is anything I could read anywhere that would make me smile more. Thank you seriously! We've had many requests for enabling URL history and shareable URLs. It's not exposed in the UI yet but you can do this manually, and it's also used to set a browser default. https://andisearch.com/?q=hello https://andisearch.com/?q=hello But we really do need to add a "share search" button, and an "enable browser history" setting asap :) One of the reasons to not go through browser history by default is that it is a significant privacy leak. Browser vendors (especially Google) and others can have access to browser history. So ironically if you use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo (which I love and is an inspiration btw), then ironically Google knows more about their searchers than DDG does. But we hear you! That's coming in this next release along with the blacklist and report buttons. Thank you again for the incredibly encouraging feedback, and telling people about Andi :)
- samatman 5y ago
  It's depressing to consider browser history in the threat model but you're right about it. A thought: if you're generating a plain-search URL from a share button (great idea) you could make the URL bar have a hash of that share URL. The only information this leaks to you is who has repeated that search query, which you already knew, and the Evil Browser Distro has to GET rather than just regex if they want to know what the user has been asking about. And you don't have to curl to robots for free, or at all if they're misbehaving by running replay attacks on your clients.
  - jedwhite 5y ago
    Hashing the URL is a brilliant idea. Thank you for that suggestion. I'd been thinking about how to do it in a privacy-safe way and of course that's a great solution. We can probably get it so you can navigate back and forward through searches either by tapping the bubbles like now, or by using browser back and forth, but without losing your session, just changing the current result set and jumping to the right point in the conversation thread. I feel slow for not even thinking about that before :) The curl/robot attacks will be an issue. We have a few things we're building to help but it has killed a lot of search startups! And that's a very simple and elegant solution without many downsides. Thanks seriously!

jedwhite 5y ago

As a coder, I don't think there is anything I could read anywhere that would make me smile more. Thank you seriously! We've had many requests for enabling URL history and shareable URLs. It's not exposed in the UI yet but you can do this manually, and it's also used to set a browser default. https://andisearch.com/?q=hello https://andisearch.com/?q=hello But we really do need to add a "share search" button, and an "enable browser history" setting asap :) One of the reasons to not go through browser history by default is that it is a significant privacy leak. Browser vendors (especially Google) and others can have access to browser history. So ironically if you use a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo (which I love and is an inspiration btw), then ironically Google knows more about their searchers than DDG does. But we hear you! That's coming in this next release along with the blacklist and report buttons. Thank you again for the incredibly encouraging feedback, and telling people about Andi :)

samatman 5y ago
It's depressing to consider browser history in the threat model but you're right about it. A thought: if you're generating a plain-search URL from a share button (great idea) you could make the URL bar have a hash of that share URL. The only information this leaks to you is who has repeated that search query, which you already knew, and the Evil Browser Distro has to GET rather than just regex if they want to know what the user has been asking about. And you don't have to curl to robots for free, or at all if they're misbehaving by running replay attacks on your clients.
- jedwhite 5y ago
  Hashing the URL is a brilliant idea. Thank you for that suggestion. I'd been thinking about how to do it in a privacy-safe way and of course that's a great solution. We can probably get it so you can navigate back and forward through searches either by tapping the bubbles like now, or by using browser back and forth, but without losing your session, just changing the current result set and jumping to the right point in the conversation thread. I feel slow for not even thinking about that before :) The curl/robot attacks will be an issue. We have a few things we're building to help but it has killed a lot of search startups! And that's a very simple and elegant solution without many downsides. Thanks seriously!