10 ms·
A new search engine
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- samirahmed 14y agoAbout 1 month ago I switched from google to bing. There different queries that use the to measure 'better'. For simple queries 'strncmp', 'giraffe', 'sound transit schedule' ... Google, Bing and Samuru perform pretty well. But Samuru is extremely slow. For more complex queries like, 'seattle dumpling restaurant that is famous in singapore' or 'how to zip a list in ruby'. I find that Google always comes out on top, bing lacks the previous search history to personalize my searches and often thinks I mean (zip as in zipfile)... But samuru gave me relevant results for all three which is rather surprising. Another type is one for people/social related searches... Bing's facebook/twitter/linkedin/yelp integration actually makes it better than google because the 'snapshot' bar it has is super helpful. However Samuru results are on par with Google and Bing results here (minus the snapshot bar). Overall I was skeptical but other than it being unbearable slow (Google spoilt us with speed), Samuru does have very good search results for what I assume is not a mutlibillion dollar product.
- jggonz 14y agoIf it isn't too much trouble, try your queries on blekko and let us know what you think. We actually have a /programming slashtag that is very useful for these kind of queries. http://blekko.com/ws/?q=how+to+zip+a+list+in+ruby+%2Fruby http://blekko.com/ws/?q=how+to+zip+a+list+in+ruby+%2Fruby http://blekko.com/ws/?q=seattle+dumpling+restaurant+that+is+famous+in+singapore http://blekko.com/ws/?q=seattle+dumpling+restaurant+that+is+... Just for fun... results in tablet-friendly format: http://izik.com/?q=seattle%20dumpling%20restaurant%20that%20is%20famous%20in%20singapore http://izik.com/?q=seattle%20dumpling%20restaurant%20that%20...
- jggonz 14y agoWe also have local results: http://izik.com/?q=seattle%20dumpling%20restaurant http://izik.com/?q=seattle%20dumpling%20restaurant
- drakaal 14y agoI like slash tags and Booleans, but the truth is search should work with out the need for those things. We support - to make things go away. Later we will expose some of the cooler things we do behind the scenes like "reviews" or "instructional" or "oped" searches, or "Simple English" but we want to do that in a way that doesn't require syntax. "If it requires syntax it isn't user friendly" is our internal battle cry.
- greglindahl 14y agoYeah, it's definitely the case that users don't want to learn or type syntax in a search engine -- Daniel Russell of Google says that a majority of searchers think they are advanced users of search engines, but a majority of them don't know about or use "" or -. That's why blekko and izik both invoke that syntax "under the hood", automatically -- starting in November 2011.
- drakaal 14y agoDo your search a second time. Our index isn't exhaustive yet, and we are slow if we haven't seen enough of the results pages before. We generate the summaries and a bunch of other things after something has appeared in a search result. This is because we aren't a billion dollar company and have to be efficient in our indexing.
- ok_craig 14y agoI don't understand. Is this spam? There is no context or accompanying article for the claim. I searched my name and the results weren't nearly as good. One data point, sure, but first impression is everything. Edit for context: original title read: "This search engine is better than google."
- furyofantares 14y agoI think it's related to this post about Liquid Helium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579336
- drakaal 14y agoSearch your name a second time. It will do better. The rankings require us to have looked at all the pages a second time.
- drakaal 14y agoSearch your name a second time. It will do better. The rankings require us to have looked at all the pages a second time.
- valtron 14y agoDoesn't work: http://www.samuru.com/?q=porn http://www.samuru.com/?q=porn
- drakaal 14y agoNope it doesn't. We decided that it was hard enough getting advertising without having "adult" search. We focus on text analysis so we aren't very good at porn searches.
- danso 14y agoJust curious, but why can't you simply disable ads on those kinds of searches? Also, having no results for this seems inexplicable: http://www.samuru.com/?q=Sex http://www.samuru.com/?q=Sex What is a casual user supposed to think when a new search engine claims that there are no results whatsoever for "Sex" on the Internet, period?
- matiasb 14y agoyou can still search 'women' and get some interesting results
- drakaal 14y agoI need to look why you didn't get a message saying we don't do those kinds of searches. Disabling ads is actually pretty hard. We had Adsense running until we got kicked for having results on "Jail Bait" those two words alone are not dirty. But I didn't focus on building long lists of dirty topics so we were returning results on that.
- nu2ycombinator 14y agoBetter in the what sense? Its not better in respective to speed of returning the results.
- drakaal 14y agoGoogle has 100 people searching every thing that can be searched. We have to do the work when you do the search. We get faster the more people use us. Exponentially.
- xaviel 14y agoTheir SEO engine is easy to game
- drakaal 14y agoIn what way? Writing something the meets our qualifications for "what is a review" is much harder to game than Link spamming. You can game the system only by writing content that is useful to the user. The only easy to game part is that we give brands a pretty big bonus for themselves. Sony.com/playstation will always be the top hit for Sony PlayStation. Even if we should favor a .gov result that says they are recalled for bursting in to flames. But as that rarely becomes an issue we are ok with that being number 2.
- regal 14y agoThere seems to be a strong emphasis in search results on domain name match, similar to Google several years back. e.g., search "dog training" and examine the results - there's a much higher mix of spammier content mixed in with helpful content than you'll see in the other big name search engines' results. Anyway, keep cracking at it; I'm sure you'll get it sharper as you go.
- drakaal 14y agoThere is, but the bonus goes down as we get deep indexing. So if you check back in a minute most the time the spam will have moved down.
- pilooch 14y agoeasily gamed, type xplr, second link.
- nilkn 14y agoI'm willing to have an open mind about this, but I think some sort of explanation on what samuru is hoping to achieve in distinction from other search engines would be helpful.
- monsterix 14y agoExactly. Doing MVP of a search engine is hard, so it is okay to lack on quality of results initially when you launch. On HN probably. Even DDG is trying to only catch-up. But to keep the engine running, and keep the hacker interested you should tell what distinction samuru is trying to achieve with its search engine. And perhaps this query http://www.samuru.com/?q=porn http://www.samuru.com/?q=porn should not be blocked by default, rather provide tools for safe search. Heard of the porn cookie guy? Just copy his footsteps, I'd say.
- drakaal 14y agoI posted an explanation in the comments. I didn't post this, or expect it to be posted so I didn't write anything up in advance.
- Glyptodon 14y agoI got decent results for all the searches I tried. For a couple searches I'd say I even got clearly better results than Google.
- D9u 14y agoI got fairly good results using decidedly esoteric queries, and although I'm on a very s-l-o-w connection I didn't notice a great speed discrepancy.
- drakaal 14y agoI didn't submit this. I didn't know anyone was submitting it. Or I would have written a post about why it is different than other search engines. Better is still up for grabs because it is new. Samuru doesn't use link authority, it analyzes pages and matches what you queried to the types of pages and picks the best matches. Let me give you an example. You search for "How to Make cupcakes" Google says give me the pages that have the most inbound linkes (over simplification) that contain all those words. The winner is Brandon's Cupcakes (not really but play along for a minute) because it says, "We know how to make the best cupcakes, because we have been doing it for 25 years" That is not a useful result. Samuru on the other hand says "how to make cupcakes is a search for instructions" and it looks for pages that match the words, and are written as instructions. We weigh other factors, like is there an author associated with the article. Do they routinely write about the topic? We do this for reviews, products and other things as well. To be a full replacement for Google we need Driving directions, and image search and a lot of things. But in order to do all the other things we are doing we needed a search engine. (related content, analysis, speed testing, building a corpus of words) Responses get better if you search something someone else has searched or do a second search 30 seconds later. This is because we haven't deep indexed the entire Internet yet, and so we don't have all the deep data.
- Matt_Cutts 14y agoHey Brandon, congrats on launching Samuru! I'll be curious what you think of running a search engine after being an SEO for so many years.
- jayzalowitz 14y agoMatt, any insight for people wanting to build new search areas out?
- drakaal 14y agoI am enjoying it. We went with the approach of how can we make this impossible for Brandon Wirtz to game. How can we make this about the content more than a popularity contest. Now that we are both in the business of stopping spam we should grab lunch sometime.
- fmoralesc 14y agoOK. My first try was to search for "plato dialogue concerning friendship". Google gave me the result I expected (a reference to the Lysis dialogue) through wikipedia and a bunch of articles about it (the most helpful being a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ranked third). It didn't link the text though in the first page (it only appears in the third page of results, with a copy at the MIT Classics archive). Samuru gives me a bunch of general articles on Plato first (oddly enough, the first results are articles from the SEP, but not the article on "Plato on Friendship and Eros".), some noise and then information on the Lysis. The text itself appeared at 25th place. Something I find interesting is that one of the snippets samuru gave me (on the 5th result) has a pretty good description of the lysis as the item most likely to be the "plato dialogue concerning friendship": "the dramatically later Lysis presents Plato's more developed understanding of love and friendship than the dramatically earlier Symposium and Phaedrus". From this description of the Lysis one could gather that the text of the Lysis itself should be a very relevant result to the query; at the very least, that information about it should be weighted as more relevant to the query than info on the Symposium or the Phaedrus, and then info on those over all else. From this, I think, one could build a better representation of a good answer to the query than in google or samuru. I think natural language analysis is very promising here. I hope work on this area yields good results, but it seems like a hard problem.
- Dn_Ab 14y agoCounterpoint. I was surprised by it. A couple weeks ago I decided to start recording any search phrases which I felt were tricky or required good language modelling. "baby features kept in adulthood" is the only one I've thought worth recording so far. You can compare the results in Google, Bing, DDG. Only Samuru and Google have it on page 1. Samuru has it as the first result. But this is just one example so I can't draw any conclusions. Curious to see how well it performs in general.
- fmoralesc 14y agoJust for the record: I didn't want to sound dismissive of samuru. I actually think the results I had were not bad at all (the fact that it gave me a link to the lysis in the front page was great UX-wise, even though it is worth pointing out that samuru yields more results per-page than google). The case I pointed at was simply a case where I thought information could be gathered from the dataset that would lead to better results than those presented by samuru, or google (I also tested bing, but the results imho were poorer than google's). "baby features kept in adulthood" is a weird one too. You are right samuru yields the best result in first place if one meant to get info on neoteny, but then, on first sight, it is the only relevant result in the first page. And the same thing happens with google.
- orangethirty 14y agoAside from the different processing on the back-end, what else does samuru do? I'm curious. Disclaimer: I'm the guy behind Nuuton (a search engine).
- drakaal 14y agoSummaries instead of Snippets. Document Type to Query Type Matching (looks like you are looking for a review we favor reviews, looks like you are looking for instructions we favor how to's)
- orangethirty 14y agoI wonder why you decided to follow the same old search formula. There is so much to innovate in this area. For example, Nuuton uses #hashtags for trending results. Say you go and make a search. All related terms would appear as #hashtags somewhere in the page. These are created by the users and by the system. It also uses the / and the ! to filter results in different ways. Say: /Honda !modified, gets you pages of modified Hondas. Click on a #hashtag, say #turbocharged, and you would get turbocharged Hondas. Why so many tools that appear to do the same thing? They are close in functionality, but affect different factors in the back end.
- drakaal 14y agoHow do I teach 2nd graders, their 62 year old teacher, and my mom to do those things? We are focused on making interfaces that are Zero Learning Curve. Our goal is to allow you to ask for what you want and get it with out having to know how to ask.
- orangethirty 14y agoHow do you aim to provide correct answers to incorrect or incomplete questions?
- saejox 14y agoI find it funny that a Google competitor search engine using Google Analytics and AdSense.
- DanBC 14y agoI wish you luck with this! Google is excellent. Bing is also excellent (with minor differences). DDG and Blekko are adding interesting and useful features. But they all feel a bit like they're a mono-culture, and thus vulnerable to gaming. Black-hat seo seems to be something that Google is pretty good[1] at dealing with. White hat SEO and ads have changed the web drastically from what I remember. So it's really nice to have an alternative method of search that searches in a different way. Your post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580321) highlights a few things I find frustrating in search at the moment. [1] It's odd that all the work they do isn't noticed.
- raulonkar 14y agohow ur search engines index the site? how can i submit in it?
- drakaal 14y agoYou don't have to submit we will find you. He have a bot, I apologize I don't recall the user Agent at the moment... It comes from a Google IP address since we are running on Google AppEngine. So we have less control over the bot's user agent than I would like.
- drakaal 14y agoAlso if you use the TLDR plugin it will "submit" the link. (assuming you aren't on an HTTPS connection or Logged in to a site)
- kephra 14y agotwo suggestions: - you need a favicon, so its possible to pull your site into an icon bar for bookmarking. - you need a search engine registration, so its possible to use it from search engine tab in browser
- p1mrx 14y agoYou should enable IPv6 on your naked domain, in addition to www. The DNS records are listed here: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2579995 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2...
- drakaal 14y agoGoogle AppEngine Issue. I'm not sure we can make that happen, but I will look in to it.
- arcatek 14y ago"Why Samuru" => Spelling suggestion : "Why Samurai" It's interesting, results are not so far from what I want. I'll give it a look for my next searchs.
- drakaal 14y agoSamuru was a samurai. Several Japanese anime characters are named Samuru and are samurai. It is also turkish for otter.
- hcho 14y ago"Su samuru"(literal translation: water sable) is the Turkish for otter. Turkish is an agglutinative language, that last u is actually a possessive affix and doesn't make sense when the word is by itself.
- lez 14y agoIt works with TOR.
- tokenadult 14y agoGhostery reminds me that this site runs Google Analytics, so the site founders apparently do trust Google for some services.
- drakaal 14y agoWe run on Google AppEngine. So we use Google for a lot of things. Building all of the pieces that make google is more than 10 people can do in a year. We have 5 developers. And most of those only came in the last 6 months. We may build analytics, but it will be a while.
- bekman 14y agoCongrats, search my name and satisfied with the results,
- kludu 14y agoI searched for "pussy", "sex" and "porn". No results. WTF is this shit?
- swah 14y agoIts nitpicking and a jerk to say this but.. the "powered by Liquid Helium" tagline is quite corny...
- Sami_Lehtinen 14y agoThis search engine is miserably slow, there might be room for some optimization.
- saintx 14y agoHow can they trademark the words "Liquid Helium"? The first search I did on Samuru was for Liquid Helium and it brought back about a half million results, all of which I assume are violating its purported trademark.
- drakaal 14y agoWe can trade mark it in the context of software. We don't sell frigid gas.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- prawn 14y agoDoesn't seem to tailor results to your location so might not be as useful for people outside of the US? Or did I just try a stupid search? I performed a vanity search and it was listing different names before there was anything about me. Same search in Australia on Google has me in four of the top six spots.