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Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
- ryes 4y agoWould love any feedback you have :)
- nimonian 4y agoI found the sideswiping way too sensitive on mobile: when I just want to swipe right once I go through two maybe three pages. To scroll right just once I need to make a concerted effort to swipe just the right amount.
- ryes 4y agoWhat mobile device and browser are you using? I've only tested on iPhone for mobile.
- austinjp 4y agoSame. Firefox on Android.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for letting me know. I think it is now fixed. Please try again now. https://swurl.com/?q=firefox https://swurl.com/?q=firefox
- primarydonkey 4y agoFirefox on Android here. Scrolling to the next section works well but scrolling to a previous one feels too sticky now (requires too long of a swipe to the right for me at least). What a great project, I'm really enjoying it. Well done!
- ryes 4y agoGlad you are enjoying it, thank you for your feedback and help testing! Ok will test some more. The problem is kinda Firefox actually. Swurl is using this newish css snap feature, but Firefox's implementation is a bit buggy. Sorry...
- john-doe 4y agoRelated: you can use `overscroll-behavior` to prevent the browser gestures to go back/forward in history: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/overscroll-behavior https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/overscroll-...
- ryes 4y agoThank you for point that out! That could be helpful. Do you think I should implement that? Right now I still use the browser gestures too. I'm just getting better swiping inside vs swiping on the screen edge I guess...
- john-doe 4y agoSomething like `overscroll-behavior-x: contain;` for the scrolling container?
- goldenchrome 4y agoIs it intentional that each site section is only 80% of the screen width? Definitely make that 100% width. Phones are narrow enough already.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the feedback. There is a peek of more content to indicate it is swipe-able to see more. Kind of like websites do with images, like Netflix for example. Do you think if it was 100%, then people would still understand they could swipe?
- goldenchrome 4y agoYour site is simple to use. This is good. It also means that users won't need much help before they are proficient. But by reducing the screen width, you're punishing your users forever. You can solve this by teaching users about the interaction up front. Try placing some text somewhere on the screen that encourages users to swipe. You can hide it once they've done it once. Alternatively, shortly after page load you can animate the page to peek the next column of content. It will require a little playing around so that the instruction is clear but unobtrusive.
- ryes 4y agoWhat phone are you using right now? That would be helpful for me to consider. I did increase the column width from 320 to 335 pixels based on your feedback. It does feel better. But if I make it too wide, then the content can get too big I feel. I'll be thinking more about this feedback and will test some more. Thank you!
- justusthane 4y agoJust for an extra data point, I really like it the way it is. Seeing a peek of the next column to give an intuitive understanding that you can swipe for more is really neat (and I'm on an iPhone 8, so not a particularly large screen).
- marginalia_nu 4y agoNeat. Search UX is at the same time extremely difficult and criminally under-explored I feel. I realize this is hard with third party data, but something I'm really interested in presenting the relationships between data, and offering means of exploring them. One gripe with this design is that this page can't be scrolled on a PC. Or rather, it can only be scrolled vertically. To scroll horizontally, you need to grab an auto-vanishing single-pixel scroll bar. Although that's not really your fault as much as the browser designers' fixation with minimalist GUIs. I also think it's difficult to have these many images in an interface, especially brightly colorful images of vastly different sizes with faces. They are all powerful attention attractors, and as a result, and the result is the (excellent) structure of the website doesn't quite come to flourish as much as it could. But as I said, search UX is extremely difficult. This is a cool new take.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the detailed feedback marginalia_nu! Yes I agree search UX has not been evolving much. I wish it would. What version of Windows and what browser are you using? How old is the computer? Maybe it is something I could improve. I was figuring most modern computers can scroll horizontally well, but that isn't always the case. But I guess I am trying to push the design into the future...
- kloud 4y agoCongrats, this looks great! I think on the desktop the columns could be wider, so the preview text wraps on fewer lines and more results fit in vertically for quick eye scanning. Did you think about having the ability to display multiple primary search engines besides Google like DuckDuckGo? A while ago I switched to DDG as my default search engine and learned to trust that the search results are good enough. On occasion, I have a FOMO and fall back to Google anyway. It would be a neat feature to have them shown side-by-side. Another example is Brave Search. I like the ideas behind it, but will not experiment with it as a default engine as an early adopter due to possible friction. With a meta engine like Swurl I could keep having Google/DDG as the primary engine and include other emerging engines like Brave Search in another column to take it for a low friction/risk test drive (perhaps configured through URL parameters).
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the great feedback! I would love to have a different search source, but DuckDuckGo and Brave don't give API access to their results. I would definitely add those if they opened up access to Swurl. Know anyone that could help me with that?
- kloud 4y agoI was so excited I didn't think it through :) This is where wishes meet hard reality. I believe DDG has its own crawler. But they also rely on results from Bing for which they probably don't have rights to provide an API. So at this point the only viable alternative would seem to be the Bing API.
- ryes 4y agoJust added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
- jawerty 4y agoI really like this. I've been working on my own personal search engine and might use a ux like this now. Question, how are you detecting whether the results are twitter posts/users and not random twitter pages (like the twitter career page for instance)? Also have you considered adding options to create this type of view for any page that has meta tags for title/desc/image and a logo?
- ryes 4y agojawerty, thank you for the encouragement! I appreciate it. Yes if you could use this UX somewhere that could be cool. It is kind of a new idea for website UX. It would be cool for a music player. For Twitter, I'm just using a simple url check pattern for now to trigger it. It isn't perfect, but works well enough for now: /^https:\/\/[a-z\.]*twitter\.com\/[^\/]+$/i Yes there are thoughts for even more column types like github, or imdb. But often the meta isn't that great, or there is no API, or no good embeds. Seems like websites are more closed off now vs in the 2000-2010s.
- jawerty 4y agoThanks for your response. Also that's cool you're probably right about meta tags open graph is broadly used but not uniform in their content. As for additional sites Stackoverflow and quora would be great additions.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the feedback! Stackoverflow is already there, but it needs to be triggered by google results. For example https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort will show stackoverflow. I'll look into Quora.
- jawerty 4y agoOh nice! Do you have a way of having the user add their own?
- pschuegr 4y agoI like this quite a bit. I'd consider using something like this if only because it doesn't have ads at the top (it's a low bar). Some comments: - it seems like the order of the columns is not consistent across searches? - I'm on the laptop and the columns extend past the edge vertically - I can scroll but it's not ideal. I expect this isn't a problem on a bigger screen. - personally I don't care much for the Amazon and Instagram streams, although that might depend on the user. It certainly depends on what the search target is (any way to figure out if there's a near-perfect match with an Amazon product?) - In general I think I'd like to see Wikipedia results first, but again, depends on what kind of search it is. - (on laptop at least) it felt a little bit too dense, IMO, but I like pretty minimalist UIs. Nice work!
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the detailed feedback pschuegr! Awesome you like it. Would you prefer the columns to be consistent, vs dynamic based on search? Google web results are always first. The order of the columns is based on the Google result ranking. The Google results usually trigger the column ranking generally. For example Wikipedia will only show if Google returns Wikipedia in the first 10 results. Same with pushing Instagram order up. So it is trying to show you relevant columns depending on the search. It is only as good as Google is at it. What is the resolution of your laptop? I can test it to try to see what you see. Yes it could feel too dense. It is a tradeoff. I could make it more minimal, but less info will show. I'm trying to make it as consistent/uniform/hierarchical as possible to make it feel less busy. It is very different, I am hoping people could get use to it and then like it better... but I may be wrong there.
- pschuegr 4y agoChrome inner width/height is 2492x1452, if that's useful.
- ryes 4y agoThank you. That is super big. I did push Wikipedia to be more in front when it is relevant. Also I did increase the column width a good amount yesterday after everyone's feedback. I tried widening it even more, but then the images felt too big and less columns are shown. I think it is a pretty good balance right now. Please try it out more now and let me know if you get used to it.
- hndamien 4y agoI really like it. A few things: The dynamic columns based on search are cool. Not sure if you are learning from clicks, but that would be cool. Tradeview price data is cool, not sure if intentional or a nice side effect. Twitter results seemed to not be working, but I see they are there
- ryes 4y agohndamien, awesome you like it :) Thank you for the encouragement and feedback! Yes clicks would be cool. I could add that later if Swurl gets more click data. Tradeview, you mean the stock price chart? Yes that is a widget we added. Twitter results is actually done with a Twitter embed. Maybe you have some iframe blocking thing turned on? What browser are you using? It should work.
- ryes 4y agoOk I checked it out more. It is getting blocked due to tracking protection. So for Twitter and Instagram, the only way to integrate it well and easily is with embeds/widgets. It is iframed in with some JS code. So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it. But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
- ComplexSystems 4y agoThis is fantastic! Would be nice if other things could be added, e.g. Google shopping and so on. But I will try it for a week and see what I think of it.
- ryes 4y agoComplexSystems, glad you like it! I don't think Google shopping has an open API, if it did, would love to add that. Right now we do have Amazon and eBay, and will try to add more. Yes we do want to add more relevant columns from other websites. Let me know if there are specific ones that would really help your searches. Awesome you will try it for a week. Would really value your feedback, and will try to code any changes you would like.
- austinjp 4y agoNice. A couple of comments. Obvious question about Google (and the others I guess): are you in breach of their Terms? How are you scraping results? How can you require people using this that it will continue to exist, or is it a proof of concept? Personally I'm not a fan of endless scrolling. I never know if I've reached the end. It's also somewhat of a "dark pattern" to encourage attention. Finally, on one search, the Instagram column contained 100% broken elements, they were the browser's default error message. My connection may have failed or something. Anyway, there was no option to refresh just that column, or individual broken elements. Looks good though, nice UX overall. Off topic: anyone else remember when dogpile was the new hotness? :)
- ryes 4y agoThank you austin, I appreciate the feedback! I am using Google directly through their paid API, so it is official and legitimate. Not scraping. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview I understand infinite scroll isn't for everyone. I will add a pagination option later. We have been using and optimizing infinite scroll on my other website picclick.com for many years. People usually like it if implemented well. I understand it isn't for you though, that is valid. Yes Instagram is done by an instagram embed, and sometimes Instagram blocks aggressively. What browser are you using. I could test it some and try to figure out why it isn't working for you. Is your browser blocking Instagram embeds? Great to hear that you think the UX is good. It is pretty different, so I am really wanting to know if people find it comfortable and understandable. The idea is in the future the amount of different columns and content in the columns would get better and support more search types. We do have reddit, stackoverflow, and others right now. But we could add a bunch more in the future for shopping, travel, coding. https://swurl.com/?q=dogpile https://swurl.com/?q=dogpile I remember dogpile and using it. I think I was more on Altavista at that time.
- killingtime74 4y agoWow Is this costing you $5 for 1000 of our queries?
- sk55 4y agoI love the UX on mobile. It’s super intuitive on an iPhone for me.
- ryes 4y agosk55, I'm so glad the UX works for you! That was the big question if the different design would be intuitive for people. I am hoping the swipe to see more columns of searches will open up a whole new direction allowing more specific searches to be seen quickly. You could just swipe between different modalities. And possibly jump to narrower ones like just looking at reddit or stackoverflow, or php documentation (need to add that later).
- visarga 4y agoAre you reranking results with neural nets? I'd like to have a personalised filter + reranker that can sit on top of everything else. We need to take back control of our feeds. I think the trifecta of user control is - filtering, ranking and UI. Any of them can be used by big corporations in shady ways. Your meta search engine is already a new UI and allowing multiple sources empowers users. But we need more than that, something like customisable neural reranking or recommender systems that serve the users, not the advertisers.
- ryes 4y agoHrmm, that is some deep feedback. I thought people are really into privacy right now. For personalization I'd need to add registration and profiling and controls you need to click. Would you be into that? What types of searches are you into? Could you give me some examples to think about, that would be very helpful. Thank you!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pbronez 4y agoCheck out now Kagi does it. They give you privacy by not logging queries, but you have an account and pay them. You can tweak your results by creating rules to promote/demote/block different domains. I’m not sure how I would want results re-ranked for me. Maybe some limited promotion of geographically nearby things?
- visarga 4y agoI would agree to personalise my filters on your system. The purpose is to stop the flood of junk and spam, to evade the agenda of whoever ranks the feeds. I am already using such a system for scientific papers search.zeta-alpha.com, they do embedding based ranking and recommendations based on bookmarks and tags. It's 2022, I expect high end neural ranking. I even implemented such systems on my own, I know exactly how hard it is. For example I searched on your site "Focal Loss", and I get news about "Former Longhorn Poona Ford Shines in Win over Arizona Cardinals". Search "Softmax Activation" and get "How to activate an eSIM on your iPhone". An embedding similarity filter would have rejected that, it's not even in the same ballpark.
- conelion 4y agoSeems like a great UX to get broad information about a topic! One little thing: In my opinion the labels 'Google', 'Wikipedia', 'Twitter', etc. don't need to be fixed on mobile since you already have to icons above it and it does take up a bit of vertical space. Other than that a nice concept.
- ryes 4y agoThank you conelion. I am super glad the UX feels great to you, and you are understanding the design advantage :) That is a really good UX optimization find. Yes on mobile, since it is just 1 column at a time, I could remove the title label. The label does help to anchor the column a bit more clearly and gives consistency between mobile-desktop. What do you think about that? Is the extra few pixels height more valuable? Really value your opinion! I'll try coding it up tomorrow morning and see how it feels!
- conelion 4y agoJust to be clear, I wouldn't remove the label on mobile entirely but just not make it fixed. In the sense of putting it inside the scroll container. I only had time before to test it on mobile on my commute. Having seen the desktop version now I understand your concern. Maybe there is a way to just reduce the size of the information a bit but still keeping it structurally as is? I also think that most people can identify the source of the information just based on how it is structured (longer texts for wikipedia, youtube/twitter/reddit with its own branding, etc.) but we would need more opinions on that.
- bckr 4y agoI love this. I could see defaulting to this as my search engine. Thanks for building it and sharing.
- ryes 4y agoWow, thank you bckr! I appreciate your kind words. Here are instructions on how to default it on Chrome https://swurl.com/default.html https://swurl.com/default.html
- RamblingCTO 4y agoHm, I have no results, I can only see Google on the left side. The console says: Uncaught TypeError: data.queries is undefined web https://swurl.com/?q=google+translate:1179 https://swurl.com/?q=google+translate:1179 jQuery 6 But no blocked requests.
- ryes 4y agoHrmm, sorry about that. Please try again now. I added some more checking code. https://swurl.com/?q=google+translate https://swurl.com/?q=google+translate If it still isn't working, could you let me know the exact URL you are looking at? And browser you are using?
- RamblingCTO 4y agoHah, got it. I use uMatrix, which spoofs the http referer header. Google apparently does not like that: // API callback webgoogle({ "error": { "code": 403, "message": "Requests from referer https://www.googleapis.com/ https://www.googleapis.com/ are blocked.", "errors": [ { "message": "Requests from referer https://www.googleapis.com/ https://www.googleapis.com/ are blocked.", "domain": "global", "reason": "forbidden" } ], "status": "PERMISSION_DENIED", "details": [ { "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.ErrorInfo", "reason": "API_KEY_HTTP_REFERRER_BLOCKED", "domain": "googleapis.com", "metadata": { "service": "customsearch.googleapis.com", "consumer": "projects/blabla" } } ] } } );
- Version467 4y agoI’ve tried it on mobile and it works very well. Super smooth navigation, nothings lagging or moving in unintuitive ways. But for me personally the preview of the next column takes up just a little too much space. Coupled with the fact that the active column has no white space on the left and is off center makes it feel a little cramped. But I think this could be solved with a little tweaking. The overall layout looks and fells great. I am using Kagi at the moment, but were I to use Google I’d definitely consider using this.
- ryes 4y agoGreat it is working good for you, that makes me very happy. Glad it is smooth and fast. I tried really hard to make it super fast and optimized and small. Thank you very much for your spacing feedback. What device are you using to browse? I could try making the column a bit more wider and more spacing... It is a big tradeoff between information density and spacing. Maybe give it a try for a week and let me know if you get use to it? It will take a bit of getting use to, because the density is not like most other search engines. For example Kagi only has 1 column and a bunch of empty space on both sides. I will need to be thinking more about spacing... thank you!
- spdustin 4y agoI had a similar thought to the previous commenter. Perhaps the overflow hints could take up half of the current width, which would allow for a slightly wider first and last column. That, along with with a gradient overlaid on the sides with overflow available, fading from white at the screen edge to transparent, may provide the visual affordance you’re seeking, and the de-emphasis that seems appropriate.
- Version467 4y agoI've used an iPhone 13 pro to try it out. I think just making the column on the right about half the width that it's right now would go a long way. It's just there to show me that I can swipe to the right, not to actually be readable. Right now it takes up to much space as an indicator, but too little to convey information. I think that's what's bothering me. I could probably get used to the main column being off-center pretty quickly, so it's really just the width of the right column.
- daoudc 4y agoThis is great! If you're interested in search engine UX, I'd be interested in incorporating some of these ideas into https://mwmbl.org https://mwmbl.org - would love to get your input - join us on Matrix https://matrix.to/#/#mwmbl:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#mwmbl:matrix.org
- ryes 4y agoThat is awesome you are working on a free search engine! Very cool. Yes please incorporate any ideas you like. I do think or hope search will eventually be free and everyone will have access to a good free search API. I'll check out mwmlb deeply in the morning!
- senectus1 4y agovery cool. i like it.
- ryes 4y agoThank you senectus1! Let me know if you find anything I could improve as you use it.
- senectus1 4y agoplease add a dark theme and the ability to block results from places like instgram
- ceoatpiedpiper 4y agoIt is really impressive. It's been hiding in plain sight yet not implemented that people want to search specific social media sites and we add reddit or twitter at the end of our search to get those results .
- ryes 4y agoYa for real! That is basically what this new UX is trying to enable. Just more columns of views. I've been just seeing people swiping for more on snapchat and tiktok, thinking that UX design must be good to use for evolving something else. And hit upon trying it for search. Let me know if you have other specific search columns I should add!
- christophilus 4y agoReddit: I prefix my searches with Reddit whenever I want to read community discussion about something (e.g “Reddit best waffle iron”) Edit: it’s over there on the right. I just missed it initially. Swank!
- lordswork 4y agoNow you need to add tiktok as a column to capture those gen Z users using it as a search engine [1] [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-s...
- Kukumber 4y agoit's already a thing since forever, just a quick one from the top of my head https://www.social-searcher.com/google-social-search/?q=Paul+Graham+y+combinator https://www.social-searcher.com/google-social-search/?q=Paul...
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoWell, It works and it's a cool idea but I just don't appreciate an Instagram feed in my search results. That thing tracks you like rescue dogs.
- Kiro 4y agoPlease don't listen to this feedback. Just because it's upvoted here doesn't mean it's representative. Keep the Instagram results. It's very useful.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jand 4y agoAs this line of comments indicates, there is no consensus upon whether instagram is worth having or not. Why not let the user decide, which columns to show? You could start with a default, non-intrusive set which the user can expand as liked.
- Deriveur 4y agoI think it would be good to be able to enable and disable this column (as well as the others since you prefer some column for some research and vice versa)
- reflexco 4y agoIt just feels weird to have results from a walled off website on a search engine, unless we specifically indicate that we have an account on this website. Similar to how we don't like submissions to paywalled articles on HN.
- Kiro 4y ago> unless we specifically indicate that we have an account on this website What do you mean? The whole point is that I can search Instagram here without an account.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- column for "unexpected" would be cool - "747 airplane" generated page I almost pictured before I hit enter - in a way that's good - however it would be fun to have a little more "weird" discovery thrown in there somehow --
- ryes 4y agohttps://swurl.com/?q=747+airplane https://swurl.com/?q=747+airplane that looks pretty Hrmmm, that is a great idea. I like it. Do you have an idea of a good source for that? Is there a website you like for discovering the unexpected? I guess maybe something like 9gag? https://9gag.com/search?query=747%20airplane https://9gag.com/search?query=747%20airplane
- pigtailgirl 4y ago-- not sure about a complex solution however bet the GNOD guy would have an idea - he uses HN I think - https://www.twitter.com/marekgibney https://www.twitter.com/marekgibney - less complex would be just grab a random result from each of the first 4 through 14 paginations of the google results? (it that makes sense?) --
- tomschwiha 4y agoYou should add a cookie banner for EU users as you track users with google analytics without any consent. Also you should make it clear that the amazon results are ads and you earn money with your company with them.
- ryes 4y agoGood points, sorry about that. I will add that, thank you! I just threw on GA so I can see some basic usage data.
- tomschwiha 4y agoThank you. Otherwise great idea to have some horizontal view on different topics :) The idea behind that can probably also be applied to internal search results where you need to gain quick insights into multiple topics related to one keyword.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the encouragement! Yes the UX could be used for other search apps. Internal search is a good one, maybe searching a bunch different doc types or internal databases. Good point!
- pleb_nz 4y agoOn mobile and I couldn't get it to do anything. Doesn't seem very intuitive.... You only get a few seconds of someones time when they first visit, it needs to be drop dead simple. I see alot of other comments saying how easy and intuitive it is, so confused why I get nothing and can't figure out how to get something.
- ryes 4y agoPlease try a few more searches. What searches are you doing where it doesn't get anything? That would help me figure out what looks wrong, thank you for the feedback!
- christophilus 4y agoDo you have JavaScript disabled?
- diordiderot 4y agoThis looks / feels amazing! Notes: The back to top button is covered by the URL bar on Firefox mobile. Also next page/column preview is too wide imho
- ryes 4y agoThank you for letting me know about the back to top! I was able to reproduce it and fix the problem. Please try it again now and let me know if it works well for you now. I made the columns a bit wider than before. I tried even wider, but when I did, it there is a line where it is too wide, especially on desktop. Where seeing more columns is better, or seeing more of a hint/peek is better. Please try using it some more regularly and let me know if you get use to it, or not :)
- diordiderot 4y agoBack to top working well!
- ryes 4y agoGreat, thank you for the confirmation!
- lemper 4y agoi guess it doesn't work on my side. it only shows search bar, side bar, and that's it. i use firefox on windows 10 if that matters.
- ryes 4y agoOdd, I just tested it and it worked fine. What version of FF are you using? Are you using some incognito or private mode? Thank you!
- challenger-derp 4y agolove it. If i could configure my google search UX to this something like this, I would. Reminds me of TweetDeck in its early days. This is a power tool for avid searchers.
- ryes 4y agoThank you! It is like tweetdeck. I forgot about that site. Will be looking at it more for any ideas... Swurl is using Google search right now... so you could just change your default search to Swurl :) Would love the support
- qwerty456127 4y agoIt gives me a long-forgotten feeling of a newspaper :-)
- ryes 4y agoHaha, yes exactly. That is one of the design inspirations. If people can handle columns of dense content on newspapers, figured they could on search too? I hope so. Thank you for noticing and commenting that!
- silviot 4y agoReminds me of the days before Google, when it was common practice to repeat the same search on a few search engines, and Apple released Sherlock [1], which allowed you to perform the same search across different engines and aggregated the results. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
- Zanfa 4y agoOn iPhone Safari, the bottom browser url bar + the top search input and tabs take up about 40% of the total vertical space of the screen. While usually the url bar collapses to while scrolling down, it doesn’t seem to happen here, probably since the scrolling element is nested.
- ryes 4y agoYes, sorry, that is a byproduct with this design, can't be fixed because of limitations on mobile browsers. What phone are you using? On most newer phones there is enough vertical height...
- code51 4y agoI appreciate the idea and implementation. However this is literally GQ magazine implemented as a search page which overwhelms the user with irrelevant information. That's why old Google was cool: clean and relevant. I don't see anyone looking for efficiency (not social media but a search page) would want to change that.
- ryes 4y agoI agree, isn't for everyone. But I think the kids these days like as much images as possible. Seems how things are trending... I could add an option for more test focused if more people are wanting this. Because add to this thread if anyone has similar thoughts.
- aloisdg 4y agoI think that it looks like what qwant wanted to do
- nicoburns 4y agoThis worked great for me except for one thing (the “back to top” button was right under where I normally scroll the page and I kept hitting it by mistake.
- 55555 4y agoWow, I was not expecting to be so impressed. I'm going to literally just try using this instead of Google for a lot of my searches.
- ryes 4y agoLove that! Would super appreciate you using Swurl instead of Google, plus any input on anything you would like improved!
- idk1 4y agoWell that is shockingly good! I was not expecting somthing so good. Nice job! I would ask for one thing - the ability to turn off certain sources. Instagram is not of, and never will be of interest to me. Edit: 2nd suggestion / feature request: add ability to 'pin' columns to a position. 3rd suggestion / feature request: ability to add scoped google columns, I would love a column that has `site:stackoverflow.com` prefixed to all searches in the 2nd column.
- etrautmann 4y agoYep, fully agree that source selection would be huge here
- ryes 4y agoIs there some specific other sources you would like me to add? Could totally do it quickly if it would be helpful for everyone. Right now I'm thinking about the pinning and ability to add any site. Kind of tricky to implement design vs simplicity wise.
- abricq 4y agoIf OP implements these changes, I might actually start using this for real ! It is true that it is brilliant.
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- thescribbblr 4y agoFeature request : please add tab for stackoverflow. Impressive job.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the voting up this feature! It is already there https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort What search is it not showing up for you? I could try to trigger it better.
- pgt 4y agoGood brand, SWURL! Can you swop out Google for other search engines like You.com and DDG?
- ryes 4y agoThank you, glad you like the name, Swurl. I would totally be cool with swapping out other search engines, but You.com and DDG don't give any a search API, so can't do that. If you know any good other search engines that I can integrate with an API let me know :)
- pbronez 4y agoAnd Kagi The big win for this site def seems to be provider selection. Plus reordering. Would also appreciate some security assistance. The main reason I use Kagi is speed, the second is privacy. Adding more search providers reduces privacy, unless there is some nice proxying involved. Need to check this out on desktop… it’s great on mobile!
- amelius 4y agoIt would be nice if it could be customized. And allow the user to remove sites, such as Pinterest, from the search results.
- ryes 4y agoJust added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
- vladstudio 4y ago* this is excellent! * I think what many commenters really want (myself included) is the way to configure the list of sources (what they are, and in what order).
- diceduckmonk 4y agoThis is smooth! We’re building a search engine to search across cloud providers. Shoot me an email if you envision any opportunities for collaboration.
- amelius 4y ago+1 if you sort the results from least # of ads to most ads.
- ryes 4y agohaha, I totally agree. I think Google has a conflict of interest a bit there for the ranking. But if I could do that I would. At least on Swurl there is no ads.
- growt 4y agoLooks really good. But are you using the google search results api? Paying out of your own pocket? Or is it something else?
- ryes 4y agoThank you, glad it looks good for you. Yes using Google search API. Yes paying out of my own pocket right now. If you know anyone at Google that could lower the price that would be great :) Ya, not break even right now...
- growt 4y agoI'm actually in the same boat with goosh.org (also paying for it myself). I think bing results might be cheaper at scale because I see a bunch of bigger services using it (like duckduckgo, but they will have a special deal for sure). If I remember correctly there is also a hard limit for google results (10k/day?), so it doesn't scale even if you can refinance it somehow.
- sshagent 4y agodefinitely going to try and use this for a while. looks lovely. Confuses me why i like this kind of display, and things like reddit i tend to prefer one line per article no images. But the extra search sources utilizing it is lovely.
- ryes 4y agowonderful you are going to try to use Swurl regularly. I am happy it looks good for you! Lol, I feel like people enjoy content overload or can handle more content at once now. After youtube/tiktok/instagram. Let me know if there are specific sources you would like added. I am compiling a list of new ones to add.
- nl 4y agoNote that it doesn't deal well with ambiguous queries. "Jaguar" gives confused results - some try to cluster results, some give the car, some give the car.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for pointing this out. Yes this is very true, it is a pretty classic search engine problem. I think there are 2 main ways to improve this, add search related searches that could help users click to better specify, but that would need another click. Or user profiling to figure out what the person usually like, but that would require profiling. There is right now autosuggestions, that could help suggest a better query to begin with. Is that ok for now? Or what would you suggest to better improve this? Would love your thoughts on this.
- PrayagS 4y agoHyperweb[1] does something similar and I prefer their UX. The new Arc Browser[2] also has something similar implemented as a boost[3] (boost are short snippet-like extensions). Just goes to show how less reliable Google Search is becoming because of ads and bot results. Platforms like reddit (I append 50% of my searches with "reddit") bring a more human touch. Totally agree with Paul's thoughts on reddit[4]. [1]: https://hyperweb.app/desktop https://hyperweb.app/desktop [2]: https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/ [3]: https://arc.net/e/2CADECD1-9839-4057-9EA9-A9988ABC4B92 https://arc.net/e/2CADECD1-9839-4057-9EA9-A9988ABC4B92 [4]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480
- alfnor 4y agoVery smooth! I'd appreciate being able to create custom search profiles (like Brave Goggles). If I'm searching for a famous person, I might want Wikipedia, Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, [music streaming service(s)], Twitch, and YouTube results. If I'm searching for medicine, I might want Wikipedia, PubChem, MedLinePlus, and Examine.com results. If I'm searching for a question, I might want StackExchange, Reddit, Quora, and Consensus.app results. With my regular searches, I might prefer a different search engine than Google, a different microblogging website than Twitter, etc. Maybe I'm boycotting Instagram and don't want those results to show at all? What sources does the news tab use? Maybe it's extremely biased? Let the user decide! Maybe I want different news source profiles (one for serious, less biased sources; one for satire; one for local news; etc.)? What about localization? FASS.se is a popular medical database in Sweden, so I'd like for those results to be displayed in my medical search profile. It would also be cool if the results in the Google column automatically filtered out the results available in the other columns. I mean, since I already have the Wikipedia results in its own column, I don't need the Google column to hand me a Wikipedia link. I'll stick to Brave search for now, but it's a cool tool!
- wasw 4y agoTop features! I immediately thought in profiles as a nice extra feature when I saw this. And I even thought that it can be done automatically based on your search query without the need for profiles, I think it would be difficult to implement though. Maybe is the future of searching, who knows!
- ryes 4y agoThanking for voting up the profile idea! It is a good one. Do you have any example searches? That would be helpful for me thinking about this. What searches would you want to see more of something else, that Google isn't already doing a good job of? I could code things where if something shows up in Google results, it triggers another column of content from a specific source. Just need some more examples of what people are looking for.
- 4y ago
- kytazo 4y agoI'm almost convinced that such a layout is the future of search results. I think open sourcing the code would turn this thing into the next searx or saerx might end up picking an up an idea or two. In any way it would be great many people contributing to something like this and implement missing functionality. Speaking of it, you can rule out any column you don't wanna see by appending a couple of rules into uBblock like these swurl.com###twitter swurl.com###instagram swurl.com###youtube swurl.com###news swurl.com###images
- ryes 4y agoThank you for that super nice comment. Just trying to do something new and creative :) If enough people ask to open source that is possible. Just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you!
- kytazo 4y agoBoy that was fast! Well done, thanks. Wish you the best for your project, glad others like it as well =) As far as UX goes another little thing I would suggest is making the flexbox columns grow instead of shrinking so that they properly utilize the entire width of the screen and as a bonus spice you could contemplate about dynamic column width where the primary column (first or possibly hovered one) is proportionate to the rest of the columns in tandem with the golden ratio. I found golden ratio is indeed a really pleasing analogy from vim splits to tiling windows widths or practically everything. If not for making the columns disproportionate you should definitely make them utilize more of the real estate as they kind of hinder usability and UX when shrieked. Good luck with everything buddy!
- smcleod 4y agoI am surprised how much I like this. I was expecting it to be another rehash - but yes, this is nice.
- ryes 4y ago:) Thank you for the nice words! Yes it is super different, glad people get it... I wasn't sure if it would be liked and understood.
- wasw 4y agoWhat a positive surprise, I wasn't expecting something like this tbh. The UX is amazing. I will use it for sure with some additional and essentials features for me at least: - Ability to add and remove some columns: I have no interest in using Instagram or Twitter in my search results and I have interest in using Stackoverflow or HN for example. - Ability to customize the width of each column for desktop: I have read in your about us page that you clearly state that “Mobile is primary”, however I would be interested in using it on my desktop on a daily basis and it would be nice to have the google column wider than the others for example. - Possibility to customize the order of the columns: I think this is an obvious one. Do you have any of these changes in mind for the future? Congrats!
- ryes 4y ago:) happy it was a good surprise! Thank you for the nice words. Ok just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you! Stackoverflow is there right now. Not sure how best to trigger HN, let me know if you have any suggestions on that. Probably not good to show it all the time. I did test the Google column wider for a couple of weeks, but ended up changing it the same as the other columns. Design wise it came out that consistency was a lot more valuable for UX. Let me know after you use it for a while and get use to things, I will reconsider adding this if it still would help you! On ordering, you mean manually? Right now I am trying to do that all automatically without thinking or manual settings, and trying to optimize for relevancy. Let me know more about your problems or ideas here. For changes, right now based on all the feedback, seems like I should consider more sources, sort options, and dark mode?
- wasw 4y agoNice! much better now without Instagram and Twitter (at least for me), good job! I'm going to give the Google results column with the same width a try, maybe you are right. I think it also depends on the specific user’s screen size. In any case, I would recommend you let each user decide the width of the columns. About ordering, yes, I was referring to manually, but I hadn’t thought in automatically mode tbh, but based on relevance it is probably best as you mention now that I think twice about it. I don’t know how easy or hard is to implement this feature the right way though, it may even depend on each user specific search habits, but it just a thought. And regarding changes, yes, those would be the must-have, highest priority, and most valuable features you can add imo.
- T3RMINATED 4y ago
- aqme28 4y agoWow, really feels like “mobile-first” on my phone in a way that Google never managed.
- dteiml 4y agoIt would be great to add Udemy and Coursera (and other edtech platforms). I had an idea about a search engine that would open Youtube, Udemy, ... and that way allow you to find learning resources really simply a few years ago :-)
- npritchard 4y agoThis is class! It'd be cool to bundle multiple queries together into a single search, giving a combined feed of each.
- parabyl 4y agoThis is something I've really wanted for a while, and the design implementation is far better than what I would probably have gone for. Very nice! Bookmarked as a new Search Engine.
- ryes 4y agoAwesome you bookmarked it. Glad it helps with what you were wanting!
- amaotox 4y agoI love it. Good job!
- ryes 4y agoThank you, appreciate the kind words!
- alexcaps 4y agoBut… where are all the ads???
- sloucher 4y agoWhen I first tried it, I was like "oh, so the left-most column is the ads". It was only after trying a different query that produced fewer ads that I realised the left-most column is Google :-)
- taneq 4y agoYou turn them on once you have your first million hits/day. :P
- ryes 4y agoNo ads :)
- talhof8 4y agoVery cool! Not working on my Firefox though (Ubuntu). Had to use Chrome for this one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ryes 4y agoThank you! Hrmmm, I don't have Ubuntu. What version of FF are you using? Did everything not work, or certain parts? I know Firefox seems to block embeds.
- andrew-ld 4y agoI don't like that there is a horizontal scroll bar, it's uncomfortable to use and I'm not familiar with them, it would be convenient to make that with the mouse leaving the left button pressed it would be possible to make a gesture from left to right and vice versa to be able to move instead of using the horizontal scroll bar edit: I saw that it is possible to move around using the top left buttons but I find them inconvenient
- luuuzeta 4y agoYou can move left to right and vice versa using the mouse wheel if your mouse supports it.
- redmen 4y ago
- howmayiannoyyou 4y agoPerfection. I would make this may default search UI, particularly if I could integrate it with MacOS and Chrome. Great work.
- switchstance 4y agoWhat do you mean? You can easily set it as your default search.
- ryes 4y agoYes you can do that in Chrome, here are some instructions https://swurl.com/default.html https://swurl.com/default.html What browser are you using?
- breck 4y agoThis is amazing. Quick question, in your example you did "Paul Graham y combinator". I then tried https://swurl.com/?q=breck+yunits https://swurl.com/?q=breck+yunits and it worked great, so I thought that I was lucky that my parents gave me a UUID and my results worked better than PG! But then I tried your original query except without "y combinator" and the results were just as good (clearly PG is most famous PG by far). So was curious why you added the "y combinator"?
- ryes 4y agolol, your own UUID, I like that. I added y combinator just to focus the search more. I think before without it, Swurl gave a few other results that were not relevant.
- switchstance 4y agoI love this. If you're looking to collaborate or potentially sell, let me know. tyler at failure dot inc Nice work!
- ryes 4y agoThank you Tyler! You've done some great work with motionarray! I love bootstrapped companies! Would definitely be open to collaborators, will need to figure that out later. Today need to code a bunch of features :)
- P373 4y agoI made this my default search to give it a try. I first interacted on my iPhone - was slick. Then, interacted on an ultrawide monitor--so much information at once. I would like the ability to add sources to search. For example, search HackerNews or industry specific websites.
- ryes 4y agoWahoo, thank you for making Swurl your default search. Ya on an ultrawide, it is beautiful to see! If you give me some more examples, I will add them. I am seeing a lot for hacker news. But how do you think it should be triggered? Show all the time, or show only in certain cases? For industry things, it would be super helpful if you tell me some exact ones since I'm not in all industries, so I would really know first hand. Thank you!
- P373 4y agoThinking out loud here I frequently search: LinkedIn Slack if looking up startups: pitchbook/crunchbase/techcrunch / finsmes industry specific (insurance): coverager, insurance journal, propertycasualty360, etc Perhaps if I logged into swurl, I could set a column to custom search one or multiple websites using a "site:" appended search (like others have mentioned)
- ryes 4y agoGood thinking. Linkedin is super closed off. I tried integrating that more, but had a hard time figuring out how. Startup sources, that is good. I could do that! I'll look more into insurance. Keep it coming! Love your good examples and sources. I'm trying not to do a logged in experience right now. People really hate logging into things and figuring out options. I mean, it is a really low percentage and usage compared to the amount of coding work... But please think out more, I'll be thinking on these things!
- borbulon 4y agoHey, this isn't working in FF for me - FF 106.0, MacOS 12.6. I thought it might be an extension, but I've tried turning off the expected culprits and nothing changes. I'm not ruling out combinations of extensions, but I'm also not going to try 30! combinations. It looks great on Safari, though! Though I do echo the sentiment that it would be great to allow customization - let me choose the columns I want and where I want them in a layout panel.
- jaggs 4y agoBrilliant implementation. Clear and easy to read. Thanks. One suggestion (which probably follows on from others) is to give the option to disable columns and also maybe move columns? For instance Reddit is placed right over on the right on my page, requiring a scroll. I'd prefer to swap Instagram and Reddit to avoid the sideways scroll. I also like @alfnor's suggestion for custom search profiles which could lump together specific sources for specific searches. Maybe a Premium option for a fee? [Edit: also maybe an option to lock different columns together, so you can scroll them together to save scanning time?]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- philistine 4y agoBy the way, where is innovation in Google Search? I just saw news of one person who built search inside CD-ROMs of the 90s all by themselves. Why doesn’t Google do that with search and integrate it somehow? Google Search has abandoned any pretense of finding new areas of search.
- cauefcr 4y agoI'm still working on a reverse of google-desktop-linux-latest, they've left debugging info in it, maybe someone can liberate their old search algorithm.
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y agoIt's very good (will definitely consider moving). Some user feedback: 1) Dark Mode please 2) Toggleable websites; I saw that the websites I was seeing were black-circles in the panel below the search box. I instinctively tried to click on youtube to not see youtube box. It would also be nice to have a global panel where users can choose if they never want to see a certain website. But these^ are just me being super picky. Overall, a great UX.
- ryes 4y agoJust added Dark Mode, take a look and let me know if that is better for you https://swurl.com/ https://swurl.com/
- ryes 4y agoDark mode is definitely on the short list of future todos... will probably get to it in the next 30 days. On toggleable, that is interesting feedback. It is a bit different. I wonder what made you feel like it was a toggle... The clickable round circles is a bit like iOS calendar. So it shouldn't be hugely unfamiliar. I did try playing around with different button looks before. But I'll think about this problem... thank you for bringing it up :) What columns would you not want to see? And may I ask why? So far the comments have been mostly an option to turn off Instagram and Twitter.
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y agoAs a picky user, I would like to have the option to remove a box of any website. E.g. I don't like youtube thumbnails (and don't think of youtube as a good resource), so it would be nice to have the option to remove it. As for implementation, it should be easy to allow users to remove any boxes, right? PS : As for the clickable round circles, if there is a list with some black circles and others white, it just feels very intuitive to click on a black circle to make it white. It could be that I don't get this because I don't use iOS.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for the info! I did just add disabling Instagram and Twitter, does that help you? You can set it in the dropdown menu on the top right. Do you think I should add Youtube? Youtube is pretty popular with most people. Ahhh, yes. I understand what you mean with the black circles looking at it that way.... I was thinking it would be ok since iOS calendar has black circles as primary. I did remove the circle border I had around the white buttons to try to make it look weaker. I could make it colored, to maybe make it feel better. What would you do to fix this?
- devX3 4y agonice stuff, I dig it. Some more customizing options and it will be very useable.
- ryes 4y agoI will be adding more options. Is there some specific ones you would like to see?
- ryzvonusef 4y agonot seeing anything in the twitter column, maybe you have run out your api limits...
- ryes 4y agoTwitter is just an embed. Is it working for you now? Maybe your browser is blocking the embed? What browser are you using?
- ryzvonusef 4y agono, still not, I checked on both microsoft edge and firefox, I checked incognito mode too it's strange, how it's only the twitter column, instagram column once gave me an error message (something about blocking embeds? can't recall) but was at least showing something from instagram, also that went away after a refresh twitter just has a dull grey background, like the column was left blank or something.
- ryzvonusef 4y agoscreenshot of what I see, if it helps this on edge (inprivate) window, but I face the same error on firefox. https://i.imgur.com/oapI6Sz.png https://i.imgur.com/oapI6Sz.png
- ryes 4y agoOk I check FF. It is getting blocked due to tracking protection. So for Twitter and Instagram, the only way to integrate it well and easily is with embeds/widgets. It is iframed in with some JS code. So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it. But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
- ijidak 4y agoWow... You have something here. I immediately felt... this is the best search interface I've used yet. I love that I can switch between images and regular search without the extra clicks and forward and back navigation. Didn't see if you had a news source as well, but imagine that is perfect as well. The only problem is, I don't know how you move forward from here.
- a_c 4y agoI like it! Nowadays I usually prefix my search with ddg's bang command to narrow my search to a subset of websites. I made a tiny browser extension to include tohe commonly searched sites. What you did is bang command on steroids. Thanks for building it!
- jrmann100 4y agoI submitted a request[1] to DDG to add a !swurl bang! Hopefully it goes through. [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
- ryes 4y agohaha, that would be cool! Thank you for submitting that!
- ryes 4y agoAwesome :) Glad you like it and get it! Yes that is the idea, people are already searching multiple sources. I was just thinking of how to do that better with a good simple UX. Let me know if there are specific other sources you would like!
- frasermarlow 4y agoVery cool. I wish it sorted all results in order of recency, or had an option for that.
- ryes 4y agoThank you! Yes I will be adding that in the next 30 days. Sort and results options for everything...
- asim 4y agoIt's cool, I think a 2x2 grid might be a better layout and maybe a summarised view rather than streams e.g no scrolling. Otherwise it's a lot of information to pack into one page. It's good though.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoSo quick search in the comments and nothing about XR/VR/MR/AR or 3D Spatial Computing which is going to rebuild the search process from the ground up using a nearly infinate canvas of depth and width realestate that decompresses limitations imposed by flat screens and force the kind of ergonomic backflips to optimize information choice and density per square inch as linked out here. This is beautiful well thought out service but I can't help but think it would look better in a 3D environment in the near future.
- CGamesPlay 4y agoIt’s pretty nice. I wish I could disable the new tab default though.
- ryes 4y agoHrmm, the problem is with infinite scroll. Opening in new tab is the best UX I've tested that works best. Anything suggestions with that problem if I did add that option?
- CGamesPlay 4y agoNo. If I click the link it’s because I’m done with the search and found my target result. If I am unsure about it, I’ll open the link in a new tab myself using middle click or long tap.
- ryes 4y agoThat is a good point, I'll be thinking about this problem... let me know if you have any good ideas how to improve that without hurting infinite scroll. Right now I think I need to leave it for infinite scroll right, else if you click back you would lose your place.
- ryes 4y agoI just added a setting to disable "Open in a new tab". Disable it from the drop down menu on the right of the search input, and let me know if that works well for you now?
- adamzochowski 4y agoBroken behaviour without google tag manager. I have disabled google tag manager, but javascript excepts it. It is generally recommended way to write javascript not to expect any spying/telemetry tooling to always be loaded.
- ryes 4y agoHrmm, thank you for letting me know! Do you have any more info on how to reproduce this problem? How are you disabling it? I'm just trying to reproduce so I can try to stop any errors breaking things. Thank you!
- joveian 4y agoPersonally, I much prefer search engines that work without javascript enabled at all (currently using Metager). I use strict uBlock Origin settings as well as various other strict browser settings like blocking third party cookies. I'm not sure how much of that you want to try to support (or what is causing my issue - the site does not work at all for me, even after enabling javascript), but trying on Firefox with default uBlock Origin settings if you haven't would be one way to check a somewhat common setup. Oh, my issue could also be the referer related settings as mentioned below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33259152
- ryes 4y agoSorry, for this it needs javascript. We are using JSON APIs, it helps make it faster. I wish we could support this, but it is just too hard vs speed or costs :(
- adamzochowski 4y agoI use gorhill's uMatrix (author of uBlock). uMatrix is awesome as it disables any 3rd party domains and only loads content from main domain that author controls. it also allows blocking by content type. Like iframes. I believe some blockers designed for telemetry blocking, like ghostery or privacy badger, will come with js shims. So they will block google tag manager, but will load a replacement JS to make sure the page doesn't behave in a broken way. uMatrix is more general purpose and does't do shims. Saying this, website should detect telemetry didn't load, and either still work, or display error saying why it can't proceed.
- Pr0ject217 4y agoGood job! It would be cool to be able to sort results descending by date. e.g. https://swurl.com/?q=linus+torvalds https://swurl.com/?q=linus+torvalds
- ryes 4y agoThank you! Yes for sure, that is totally on the todo list. I'll be adding all the search options later in a drop down. Just give me about 30 days to get to that. I appreciate the vote for these features, really helps me prioritize things!
- dukeofdoom 4y agoI searched Kanye West and his Instagram comes up blank.
- ryes 4y agoThat is a good search. Please try refreshing, it should work. Sometimes Insta errors. Or doesn't work due to Firefox blocking embeds. Let me know if it works now for you.
- luuuzeta 4y agoGood job, OP! Echoing some of the other comments, my main feature requests are: * Sources customization (e.g., I'd remove IG, and add a few more search engines) * Columns order (e.g., drag-and-drop would be neat) * Padding between columns
- jdthedisciple 4y agoNice work! It would be nice if the user could manually toggle which results to show. For example for most searches I may only want to enable Google and Twitter results.
- ryes 4y agoThank you! So all the time only Google and Twitter? The design thinking I'm going right now is less options to figure out and click, and just make it easy to jump to any source, and do the best possible to show ranked and relevant sources. What do you think? Would love more input and ideas on this!
- jdthedisciple 4y agoYea all the time. My idea was to reduce data traffic that the user maybe a priori not be interested in anyway. Me as a user I usually prefer more options and customizability.
- skilled 4y agoI suppose it's my personal bias (I like minimal & clear layouts), but this current UI you got going on feels claustrophobic at best. Since you're committing to a horizontal scrollbar, why not increase the size of columns and position the content so it feels like I am reading/looking _down_ (from top to bottom) not everywhere all at once. Also, a better scrollbar design would be nice + individually making sure each column can be understood where it is from. In other words, some kind of a heading indicator. (You already use Icon + Source name but I feel it isn't enough.) Maybe you already got all this planned out and you're busy with the algorithm stuff instead, if that is the case - sorry.
- ryes 4y agoThank you for your detailed feedback! It should look pretty clean, unless you have a browser that always shows scrollbars. What browser and operating system are you using? I think Windows and IE might show scrollbars more. Should look good on majority of popular browsers like mobile and Chrome. But if you give me more details I can look into how it looks on your side. I did try adding a stronger header look before... but it ended up looking too busy and heavy. Right now I'm trying to lean towards minimal and clean as possible consider the amount of data going on. If you can give me a mock up of what you are thinking I would love to see that!
- skilled 4y agoYou're right, I was viewing from a Windows machine (Chrome), and I haven't checked it on my Mac yet. I will try and do it on the weekend if I remember or have the time. I honestly think there's a lot you can do on the UI side, especially if you plan on having people commit to using this engine on a daily basis.
- ryes 4y agoCool, ya let me know if it looks better for you on Mac. Ya that is the problem on Windows, especially older Windows machines. I think there is a setting on Windows to make the scrollbars work more like Mac on Chrome? Yes will be trying to improve the UI more. Please try it more this weekend and let me know any more advice you have!
- jacooper 4y agoYou should donate this to Searx/ng, which is an open source meta search engine designed to search many things in the same time. https://github.com/searxng/searxng https://github.com/searxng/searxng
- totalview 4y agoThis would be fabulous for switching between brave, duck duck go, and Google. I love the UX, finally something worthwhile in the browser space. Available for purchase at any point?
- ryes 4y agoWould love to do that too, but so far I can not find an API for brave or ddg search results. Thank you for your compliment about the UX!
- ryes 4y agoI did just add Bing which is basically the same as DDG, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
- weekendvampire 4y agoI built something similar but much more simpler. Yours is way better but check this anyway: https://combinedsearch.io/ https://combinedsearch.io/
- throwamon 4y agoFirst result from Reddit for the OP URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rumq8/y_combinator_and_paul_graham_are_bad_for_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rumq8/y_combi... lol
- ryes 4y agoHa, I thought the same thing, but that really is the ranking Google returned for that... must have a lot of links to that.
- erickf1 4y agoThis is very good. I'm going to start using this first and see how it goes.
- ryes 4y agoThank you. Great! If you are using Chrome, here is how to default it: https://swurl.com/default.html https://swurl.com/default.html
- rflec028 4y agoPretty cool!
- ryes 4y agoThank you! Glad it works well for you!
- AustinDev 4y agoLove this! Consider adding eater for searching looking for restaurants.
- ryes 4y agoYes I definitely need to add more food sources! I will be improve that! I love eating lol :)
- cropcirclbureau 4y agoNice work. A simple feature that I'd like to see is if I could focus on one of the columns and have it expand, use more screen-space. And +1 on the searx comments, I'd love to use such an interface there.
- ryes 4y agoThank you! I'll be thinking on that expand idea. Anyone else feeling that, please comment here. Yes I have seen a few mentions about searx, will look into that!
- grammers 4y agoIt looks really nice, I'll be using it from now on! Thanks.
- Trufa 4y agoI am honestly kind of in shock, I truly went with the mindset of let's check this new UX for 20 seconds that I'm never gonna really use but might have something cool since it's upvoted to let's see how to make this the default on chrome and give it an actual go. OP sincere congrats on the effort.
- ryes 4y agoTrufa, for reals. I know how you feel. Gives me a smile that it surprised you. I'm surprised people like it so much :) I haven't shown many people before this. That would be awesome if you made it default and tried using it regularly! Here are instructions for Chrome https://swurl.com/default.html https://swurl.com/default.html Thank you!
- ryes 4y agoAhhh, awesome you will be using it regularly! Makes me happy it is helpful to people. I will be improving things! Please email me if you have anything that could be improved. My email is on the website top right dropdown.
- dev-3892 4y agohey it's dogpile but modern. nice
- datavirtue 4y agoVery, very nice. Don't get caught up customizing this for the HN crowd. The way it works now will have popular appeal. In any case, it is much, much better than the Google UX.
- ryes 4y agoHappy you like it! Thank you for your wise advice! I will have to choose carefully what to do and what not to do.
- jaredub 4y agoThis is pretty cool! I'm finding it very useful for searching for tattoo artists since they often have personal sites, Instagram, Reddit, etc.
- ryes 4y agoTattoos, that is a good use! Glad it helps you. Please let me know if you have any more feedback on what could be improved!
- Night_Thastus 4y agoMy only major complaint is that in the "images" section you see a lot of repeated images. I know that taking all the results and doing some kind of difference check on them/finding the highest quality version is not a simple or particularly computationally quick operation - but it would drastically improve the usefulness given the small size of the window.
- ryes 4y agoYes I agree, especially with wikipedia. But I was thinking sometimes people still want it in images so they can click and get directly to the image? What do you think about that case? If you have some more examples of queries where this is happening, that would help me improve things!
- Night_Thastus 4y agoActually this may be related to wikipedia as well. If I enter "voxel", the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th are all duplicates of the wikipedia image. The 2nd and 24th are copies of that doomguy image, but that's not nearly as severe. Looking over a couple other searches, it seems I was wrong - it really is mostly wikipedia cropping up in the "images" tab over and over.
- AlexanderTheGr8 4y agoIs there any way to get google cards? Google's cards are so useful because they answer 80% of queries without the user having to go into the website (which usually takes 2-3 seconds + ads) But I understand if google doesn't want to allow devs to get access to their cards.
- ryes 4y agoYes that would be great, but yes Google doesn't provide that. I could improve it a bit if you give me some good examples. Right now there is definitions, math, weather, stocks, maps.... I could try to add some with some more feedback
- opaschnitzel 4y agoWowowow,so COOL!!
- logicprog 4y agoDude this is so fucking cool. I just wished it offered non-Google search engines as well! If it did I'd absolutely 100% use it daily.
- ryes 4y agologicprog, thank you! Hrmmm yes a few asked for non-google. I mean DDG uses Bing. I could use Bing too. Would you want that? I could add a switch to go between Google and Bing, but not sure why you would want that. Bing isn't as good as Google results. Let me know more about why and it would be very helpful to deciding this!
- ryes 4y agoJust added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
- nicofo 4y agoThis is cool. EVen adding more search engine would be really useful, search and compare result across gg, ddg, bing, brave. Also, give the option to customize in which section to search, I don't care about images results or youtube, give the option to deselect the defaults option.
- ryes 4y agoJust added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you. DDG is basically the same as Bing. Brave unfortunately doesn't give API access to others right now.
- simjnd 4y agoThis is amazing! I'd love the ability to reorder and resize search results (e.g. having Wikipedia always be on the left, then two columns of Google, etc. you get the idea. Very inspiring to see something as old as search engine UX being rethought and redesigned, congrats!
- unsignednoop 4y agoAmazing idea, great work man. Just one suggestion; the filters should probably be at the bottom within reach of your hands.
- tritiy 4y agoVery nice, I like it lot! Great job. Is this on Github so that I can take a look?
- ryes 4y agoTritiy, glad you like Swurl. Swurl isn't on Github, it isn't open source. But it is mostly JS, you can just view source to take a look.
- senectus1 4y agohey, any chance you can publish an android widget for this? I want to replace the google search bar with swurl!