My Startup project: Qhoga.com | Hacker News Reader

My Startup project: Qhoga.com

qhoga.com

27 pointsokeumeni38 comments

"Type name, brand, and type of anything for your home or garden." is not easy to read.

My first impression is to try something like "Ikea dressers" just give me an example how I can search, like "Dresser" or "ikea" or w/e.

Yeah that phrase definitely needs to be revised. Site seems to be working well though, and fast!

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I 100% agree with the fact that you need to come up with a new name.

Really nice. It was very fast and the couple searches I did gave great results. I'll spread the word. The name is a little hard to remember though.

Thanks for your feedback. I agree about the name being weird; I lost a coin flip contest to my partner on name choice so I assumed it and getting use to it.

Don't settle on that name because of a coin flip. :P

I've looked at that name for a minute now and not only do I not know how to pronounce it, I don't know how I'd tell someone about it without having to spell it out, which makes it very easy to forget.

Something like decorefind.com is available. That's easy to remember.

I don't know, the name is already notorious...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=263022

Yeah... if you're already being referenced as having a worse brand name than cuil/knol, a name change is necessary.

Thanks, we’ll definitely work on this.

just to let you know, there's a very populous county in Ohio named Cuyahoga, pronounced somewhat closely to your name. at first i thought it was a regional search just based on the name. you might want to take that into consideration

I live in Cuyahoga County now and I grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Yet, the name never reminded me of the word "Cuyahoga." Weird. I was surprised to see that someone else made that connection.

Chalk that up to: 1) 2004 election 2) the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone" -- which mentions someone coming back to Cuyahoga Falls and seeing her farmtown subsumed by the city. Also, it's Rush Limbaugh's theme song.

The name reminds of me of Family Guy (Quahog)

I concur on the name being-- well, awful. The design, too, is not great. Branding overall, poor.

/Product/, though: It's wicked good. Useful, possibly profitable, easy. You could carve out a niche here. Froogle has never achieved dominance in the space, nor has any other product search. Good luck.

Is this a startup in the pure sense of creating technology from the ground up. It looks like you're using http://www.intelliverb.com/PESS/ - not that it matters, it's just a question of semantics. Yahoo Boss could be worth exploring too. http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

Great question! We founded Intelliverb a search engine base on the PageScale algorithm. We are now using the power of PageScale to power qhoga.com and qwili.com.

ooh, i get it! as soon as you said "qwili", the names started to make sense. "Query for HOme & GArden", qwili = "Query for WIne & LIquor"... now that i check, the About section actually explains this. but it's buried. if you want a weird name like that to stick, at least use that mnemonic as the tagline! make it more visible!

Only a coder could love such a naming convention.

My first search, for "lawn gnomes", returned no results. Come on! Home and garden? You GOT to have lawn gnomes :)

Seriously, nice start here. Good use of affiliate marketing, as others have noted. You may want to make the search more flexible and forgiving if PESS provides a way - e.g. I typed in 'coffe machine' and got no results, then 'coffee machine' and got many.

Design needs work on 2 levels:

User-friendliness

* when using the categories on the left to narrow a search, clicking a category always adds it to the end of the search, even when it's already included, even when it doesn't have any effect.

* likewise, while you can "drill down" by selecting additional narrower categories, you can't back out by selecting a parent category or de-selecting a category.

* the numbers here are off a bit. "Floor Care" gives 97 results, but the category on the left claims 71

These little details can lead to frustration for the user.

Visual Design / Branding

* Particularly considering your target market here, you guys desperately need a visual designer to create an attractive look for your site, and to give your site a feeling. Look for example at http://www.projectwedding.com/. They do a great job of design, where every element of the page is intended to evoke an emotion or association in the mind of the viewer, from their logo to the color scheme, to the (I assume) hand-picked lead imagery for the front page. Of course yours will be different, because your target market is different, but you can get a general idea from them.

* For example, you should not just have text examples, but show the thing that your buyer wants, so they can more easily make the association, and even make the leap to thinking what their home would look like if only they had those drapes &c.

* You also need a name and logo which can mean something to the user. Even non-sense brand names are chosen specifically to evoke an idea or emotion, to make some association. You should pick a name which really communicates what your site is, though not necessarily in direct terms.

I agree with others though, that the site looks promising. Good luck!

I like it a lot, however some of the results seem to be 'old' links that don't exist anymore. e.g., I searched for a black leather sofa, and got amazing results that however didn't exist anymore on the target site. Maybe consider updating your index more often (not sure how difficult of a problem that is for you), but still - great site!

Suggestions for improvement:

Spell-check search queries, à la google. E.g. searching on [vacum cleener] should ask if you meant/search on [vacuum cleaner].

Search also for synonyms. E.g. [secateurs] gave me no results, but [pruner] did. It would be good if the latter search was automatically done given the former query.

Have someone proofread. For searches on misspelled words "Type Less Words" s/Less/Fewer/, though your search doesn't match fewer results when more search words are added. "Type Words Correct Spelling", perhaps just "Correct Spelling". But, if a word does not match anything, run it through aspell with an aspell dictionary created from your product lists.

Looks good. Design point: I'd try to stick with a grid. The "beta" text seems to have a random position off to the right, and while the table of example searches are functional, they could use some consistent cell padding.

On the search page itself it'd be great if you tried to align the left margin better. Right now the top bar hangs out, which makes the page flow poorly for the eye.

In general, reduce number of vertical columns of alignment. A grid helps that. That's my advice.

Read this blog post / attached PDF -- it's fantastic: http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2007/0318_oh_yeeaahh.php

Looks good, its clean, its fast, and it returned good results. I'd agree the name isn't great and the initial text in the search text box should be reworded. Is this an example of what can be done with Intelliverb's hosted search service?

Great feedback, thanks. Yes it is an example of what can be done with intelliverb search service. Also check out qwili.com.

Good idea. Did you research your target audience? Because if your target audience is females, you should put more effort into your design approach.

You should read http://www.scribd.com/doc/2629403/Marketing-to-Women-The-Wor...

A summary: as guys (and especially as hacker-types), we don't know anything about what girls like or care about.

Best of luck.

This seems like a very good idea. If you stick with a vertical search for long enough, it will make you money. Keep improving it and don't give up!

Oh man, my girlfriend is going to love this!

I'm going to love it too, because it means less having to help her find this kind of stuff.

That was my first impression anyway. I tried searching for "bedrame" and got 6 results. Then I tried "cb2 bedframe" and got the same number of results, so it actually doesn't seem all that helpful to me, unforunately :(

Thank you for explaining what your name means on the About page. That, if anything has impressed me the most so far.

Nice and clean, but the omnipresent dollar signs might put off a lot of people. I'd suggest deemphasizing those a bit and adding some content to interest people who are still thinking about what to spend their money on. Tease them in the door, and don't greet them with a cash register as soon as they come in.

Reminds me of Octopart except it's for Home and Garden utilities. Hmmm I wondering what a nice a idea :-)

Pump up your positioning. I could barely figure out what I was looking at for a few seconds and almost hit the rewind button before I caught it in the middle.

Looks exactly like qwili. Are you guys going to create a new search engine for each vertical and name them all something like qosyf? ;-)

It does "home" all right, but not "garden." I typed in some searches for flowers and just got home accessories.

More of a 'product search' then anything. Creative use of affilate marketing :)

queue-hogger? Is the name one of those random-yet-still-pronounceable-names-with-an-available-.com-address?

Looks like you're using .NET. Heresy!

You know .NET is not that bad, plus a great percentage of popular domains are done in .NET. Let’s not let our hatred for Microsoft shadows our vision of technology.

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