My startup: Build your own search engine and share it. | Hacker News Reader

My startup: Build your own search engine and share it.

intelliverb.com

5 pointsokeumeni18 comments

The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).

You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.

See a sample we did for YC and related sites:

http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750

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Where are you hosting this? Seems you are hitting a connection limit, cant serve any more pages right now.

Neat idea, but it's also been down every time I clicked so far. If you're working on fixing it at the moment, you should comment in here, so people know to come back.

It might be wise to invest in some load testing so you know in advance this won't happen when you get traffic at a larger scale.

Rollyo is about 4-5 years old and is the best known of these,. there are probably quite a few more. Will you be doing something different at all?

http://rollyo.com/

The main difference: whether a site is public or not you can build a search for it, chose what content to include in your search, when to crawl it and who to share it with.

The Idea is to empower the user with the choice of URLs to crawl, when to crawl from where to crawl (you can crawl from you car as long as you have internet access).

You build your own repository around your personal web site, company intranet, your favorite sites or subject and share it with friends or colleagues.

See a sample we did for YC and related sites:

http://www.intelliverb.com/Search/?six=SRC6187978038750

Quick feedback:

* I like the idea. Reminds me of Google's CSE tools, but with individual crawling control.

* I think you need to proofread the text on the main page a bit. Some of it doesn't parse correctly for me, for example: "You decide what sites to crawl indexed and search"

* A lot of your links on the right are 404 or missing.

* Your signup form does not accept emails with a "+" in them. So I cannot signup with my default email address. Please resolve this if you can.

* So the crawler itself has to be a local app? In other words, my local computer is doing the crawling? I had assumed the service was that your site would do the crawling based on the information I provided and on the schedule I wanted.

Seems like an interesting project, but you do need to work on the user-facing aspects a little to prevent people from being confused.

The layout is pretty unprofessional, so it doesn't encourage me to want to download an EXE client to run locally.

Great feedback we'll definetly apply changes. Thx.

"You decide what sites to crawl indexed and search"

Should probably be:

"You decide what sites to crawl, index and search"

You might also consider avoiding technical terms altogether when you market it.

I like it. I wish I would have had access to this a few years ago when I had to build my own search for a company I worked for :) How do you plan on making money?

So far we’re thinking ads for individual account and make it payable for companies of some size.

What technology are you using for your crawler?

It may sound silly but we built it from scratch. I think it was necessary given what we wanted to achieve.

> we built it from scratch

Thats anything but silly.

I very much like the idea. You should consider selling it on an appliance that you've optimized for, a la google search.

Err, Rollyo.com?

Our idea is different from Rollyo

We drive the search 100% You initiate the crawl; you actually chose your URLs and content not just filtering results from some domains, your repository grow over time totally under your control You can crawl behind firewalls, this is practical for intranet With the URL to your search, you can search from anywhere and share with anyone, no login necessary

Still to come: File search and Data search with a great emphasis on ecommerce

Sounds like an awesome idea, but you should really hire a designer who can focus on the interface.

you should focus on this idea. SEO for "search behind your firewall" don't try to be generic. don't try to put a foot on rollio market.

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