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I made a 'search engine' for fun
This was a weekend project for fun. The problem I had was I felt like existing search engines were too cluttered and I couldn't easily sort results by websites.
I experimented and rather than returning so many results, it returns the results from a few number of websites and tries to rank in on a confidence level from that smaller subset.
- vu0tran 14y agoThe website isn't meant to be used for any real utility. What I wanted to demonstrate was just an alternate way to look at search. I think we've just gotten so used to Google and its millions of results; I wondered, what would happen if I took that all away and presented only just a small handful of results?
- tomasien 14y agoThat's kind of exactly what I saw, and despite the lack of utility, I was like "Oh! This is nice!"
- DividesByZero 14y agoSometimes minimal is best. Then again, Google does have the 'I'm feeling lucky' button - maybe that ought to just display a few results for them? Either way, nice experiment!
- dave5104 14y agoThe "I'm Feeling Lucky" button doesn't actually work anymore. :(
- bencevans 14y agoYep however now you type what you want, it works some ajax magic, press tab to activate the keyboard shortcuts then hit enter which takes you to the first result. I use it without thinking about it now and I don't need to touch the mouse bearing in mind I'm on the keyboard typing the search.
- hkmurakami 14y agoThis actually seems quite nice for a slightly extended dictionary :).
- Jarihd 14y agoAre you using search results from other search engines and applying some heuristics on that or have you mined your own web data. nice start though !!!
- hfs 14y agoExcept usually Google's top results are exactly what I'm looking for. It's when they're not that those millions of results come in handy - otherwise there are tons of things I'd never find.
- tomasien 14y agoI don't hate it!
- vu0tran 14y agoBig surprise! Thanks! :)
- jere 14y agoNeat. So it just searches wikipedia? If so, I can't really complain. 95% of my searches are followed by "wiki" normally so I can get wikipedia first.
- vu0tran 14y agoWikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow. Try putting in a coding question and Stackoverflow will show: http://foobub.com/?s=python+xrange+vs+range http://foobub.com/?s=python+xrange+vs+range If you put in a random question, yahoo answers will probably appear: http://foobub.com/?s=why+does+sweat+smell+so+bad http://foobub.com/?s=why+does+sweat+smell+so+bad Wikipedia just generally comes up first as the way it's weighted. It answers and provides knowledge for most queries.
- whalabi 14y agoI searched for "ruby on rails" and it got me wiki and quora, but not stackoverflow, which I would expect. See: http://foobub.com/?s=ruby+on+rails http://foobub.com/?s=ruby+on+rails Also, searching for "stackoverflow" gives unexpected results: http://foobub.com/?s=stackoverflow http://foobub.com/?s=stackoverflow Otherwise, surprisingly useful for something so simple. If you could tone down/up result sources and it had more (e.g. show me nothing from yahoo answers, more from stackoverflow), i would concievably use this instead of the goog for most things. Like many people most of my googles are "wiki blah" Good job!
- Katelyn 14y agoI thought I was the only one who does this. There should be an easier way..
- mochizuki 14y agoIt keeps telling me an apostrophe is the number 39. No, but seriously it looks neat. What are the websites it queries for results? I've seen Yahoo! and Wikipedia so far.
- vu0tran 14y agoI replied to this above. Just: 'Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.' Stackoverflow comes up when you do coding questions, yahoo answers when you do just random questions. Although, Quora doesn't appear as often as I like. I need to do a bit of tweaking. Here's an example where Quora comes up: http://foobub.com/?s=vu0tran http://foobub.com/?s=vu0tran
- codezero 14y agoPretty cool, I actually searched for Quora as one of the first queries and was surprised it showed up, now I see why! I'm impressed with the results for most (obviously not esoteric) searches. One thing: lots of URLs don't wrap or truncate, so you get some overflow, example: http://foobub.com/?s=how+is+babby+form http://foobub.com/?s=how+is+babby+form
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago' gives ' (ie it's the ASCII in hex of apostrophe)
- clone1018 14y agoAdd <!doctype html> and do <input id='search' name='s' placeholder='Type then hit enter' type='text' autofocus>
- vu0tran 14y agoThanks for the suggestion. It's in!
- clone1018 14y agoNo, thank you! Much more usable now, there's also a couple other markup changes that need to be done, planning on open sourcing this?
- vu0tran 14y agoYeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.
- drhayes9 14y agoTry open sourcing it before it gets unshitty. I'm trying it myself, just putting things out there and saying "to hell with it" because, ultimately, unshitifying things is Zeno's paradox kind of work; you're never really done. And, really, it's probably better than you think anyway.
- blefloch 14y agoWhen the search term is one character long (e.g., a single quote, or an ampersand, or whatever), it would be nice to get the corresponding Wikipedia page if it exists. It's pretty much impossible to google for special chars.
- ctdonath 14y agoSearching for "foobub" on foobub.com gives http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub - clarification please?
- clone1018 14y agoif(input != found in index) redirect( google search )
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- vu0tran 14y agoMy site does not SEO well. If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e. http://foobub.com/?s=cats http://foobub.com/?s=cats If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most likely: http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20and%20everything http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20... If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you: http://foobub.com/?s=foobub http://foobub.com/?s=foobub My website is not yet self-aware. No need to worry, guys.
- jaredsohn 14y agoIt is unfortunate that doing so takes you away from the site (I imagine the basic use case right now is to type in a bunch of queries to see what it displays.) Ideally, it would show Google search results in an iframe, although I imagine that is against their TOS. Maybe just linking to Google search results would be a better experience.
- eru 14y agoOr you can use a similar deal to what duckduckgo does.
- nickmolnar2 14y agoAre you crawling these sites yourself, or using the Bing API to get the index?
- vu0tran 14y agoI'll get into more detail with a blog post tomorrow, but I just used Yahoo/Bing. It was a 3 hr project, figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel :)
- jrussbowman 14y agoiI felt the sameway . I just used various apis for unscatter.com you may want to see about getting access to the blekko api if you keep playing with it. iI use some of the slash tags they offer for some search views, it's real easy to work with.
- photorized 14y agoAre they charging you for requests (over the initial allotment of 5,000 requests per month), if this is done via Bing Web Search API in the Azure Marketplace?
- znt 14y agoIs there a way to exclude websites from results? Such as Quora?
- orangethirty 14y agoWell done. I like how answers are given as tiles. Its a good experiment to try with nuuton. I do not like, however, that you did not serve too much from the classic search UI/UX. Shoot me an email: my username [at] nuuton [dot] com
- kami8845 14y agoHey, what does the backend look like?
- vu0tran 14y agoHi, since there seems to be a lot of interest, I figured I could answer all of them at once in a blog post which I'll post sometime tomorrow. To answer your question though, the backend is running on Python. There's no particular reason. I just find it a lot easier to script with. It's running on fCGI with nginx on the backend server. On the front is PHP... which is served through up by apache. I find it easier for me to do $_GET, hack around forms really fast and also just echo Javascript everywhere.
- jbranchaud 14y agoI'm confused, if this is a search engine, where are all the ads?
- mehulkar 14y agohaven't hired the mbas yet :P
- s_m 14y agoYou might want to sanitize the placeholder attribute on the results page - in its current state, it is susceptible to XSS.
- vu0tran 14y agoThanks for the tip. I was trying to remember what XSS was. http://foobub.com/?s=xss http://foobub.com/?s=xss Bam. Foobub.
- nsxwolf 14y agoThis just redirected my search to Google. Edit: I see, it's a feature not a bug. My search results weren't found by foobub.
- hnriot 14y agoyou made a search engine client, it's very different. A search engine is an index atop a corpus of content that you crawl. It might be useful for you to look at jQuery Masony library for your presentation.
- vu0tran 14y agoYeah, I knew I must have been missing something. That's why I put "search engine" in quotes. :)
- jusuchin 14y agoYouch... inline styling and javascript outside of the closing </html> tag..
- hackerlass 14y agoNeat, would like to see the code. If you're crawling sites yourself, that would be really interesting. Nice work.
- mintplant 14y agoHuh. This is actually rather good for programming searches; surfaced some useful things I hadn't seen before. Bookmarked. Thanks!
- nedwin 14y agoI thought this was going to be a search engine for things that are fun.
- indiecore 14y agoThat'd be interesting. Maybe scrape twitter/facebook/etc for stuff correlated with "fun" and related words?
- pgrote 14y agoOdd. The auto complete in Chrome shows me the WordPress extensions I have installed on my sites.
- state 14y agoIt's nice to think of a search engine as something that can actually be tuned to a desired output. Nice to see. You're absolutely right that we have come to think of this problem as solved, and it isn't.
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- chuppo 14y agoYou hijacked my middle-click to open in same tab instead of another one. Gah! Otherwise, very good work. I was suprised it can even do simple sentence-search. How did you make this, what is the backend?
- Ramario 14y agoThe simplicity of this makes it enjoyable. Great work!
- havemurci 14y agoI did something a little bit similar when I made www.eaisy.com. I like a minimal interface.
- sjmulder 14y agoThat’s really nice. My only gripe is that I find the definition font really hard to read.
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- tomasien 14y agoThis is by far the thing I've upvoted on "new" that I'm most surprised reached the top page. I think this is borderline definitive proof that PG is right: Google is vulnerable. I mean, just the simplicity of the results has Hacker News excited, I just think 2 years ago we wouldn't have found this the least bit interesting.
- srkiranraj 14y agoNeatly done... It's a great hack in 3 hours... Would love to learn about it, if the code is open sourced. Only one suggestion, results could be listed neatly. That's it.