I am submitting my Social Search Site, again. | Hacker News Reader

I am submitting my Social Search Site, again.

sansj.com

7 pointscosmok14 comments

I'm a sucker for voting these kinds of things up. When I think about the work I pour into my own sites... that's what this is all about, right? To me this group is valuable, in part, because I don't have people I'm working with, so I think it's fair to give a hand to others in the same boat.

About this site: I get (justly) accused of doing engineer-style-UI's with my sites, so I know it when I see it. It needs a smoother look. It also needs a good tagline or something that gives me a better idea what it does and why I should use it after glancing at the front page.

"Search" is a pretty huge category for a small company to be tackling. One suggestion given in Crossing the Chasm ( http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/14/crossing-the-chasm ) is to go after a niche that you can dominate. I don't know what that might be for you or for search results in general...

thanks bro! will consider your suggestion.

Potential Issues:

It said I was logged in as "Blogger!", but I have most certainly never seen your site before. So it seems your sessions/user/cookie/security system is broken.

Color scheme is violent.

The "about" page has completely different stylings.

When logged in, the "LOGIN" icon goes to "logout.php", you will likely need to dynamically rename it.

Whenever I select one of the "World/DE/FR/UK" settings it doesn't alter the search results, and the setting is forgotten when it loads the search page--forcing users to reset it continually is unpleasant.

You shouldn't be inlining your stylesheet, have a seperate CSS that you import.

There are several combined Scriptaculous/Prototype libraries that zip them together into one highly compressed file instead of two moderately large ones. Consider looking into that. (Further, you may want to consider doing this with only moo.fx, it is something like 3k instead of 150k, and load time for search results is not a trivial thing.)

The ajax displaying of the search results is very jerky, if you are expanding entries one by one, try expanding the entire division at once.. if you are already doing that, consider not using a visual effect on opening, just having it open responsively without the visual lag would be better (in my opinion).

Things I liked:

Access keys (have them more uniformly available)

The 10-20, 20-30 etc ranges you can click on to view results.

Ending question: why do I want to use your service instead of a Google / social bookmarking information cocktail?

wow...that was a quick response, thanks. You are right about the different styling of the "about" page, this page is utilising TigerWiki and I didn't bother to modify it's style.As that page was mainly for informational purposes, I decided to deal with it later

I might have to clarify some of your observations:

One is automatically logged in as 'Blogger', to test the site out before deciding to signup.Once I have a few active users I am going to disable the 'Blogger' account. "World/DE/FR/UK" should work now (turned out to be a cache problem, thanks for pointing out!) I will have to modify the Sliding display a bit soon. As for as your ending question goes, I built SansJ mainly for personal use. Basically, I built something that I wanted to use as there was nothing exactly similar to SansJ.Thanks to your comments, it is going to be better.

When the search suggestions pops up, it sometimes causes a scrollbar to be needed for the page, which makes the whole page shift by a few pixels. I could see this getting annoying for a user. There is an easy fix; add "body {overflow-y: scroll}" to the css.

Switching to different results pages (1-10 to 11-20, for example), the ajax is convenient but because you are contracting the old results and expanding the new ones at the same time. I would try doing one after the other (either expand the new results and then contract the old ones, or vice versa.)

The name sansj is not something that would stick in my memory, but I am curious to know what it means.

Bonus points for having Canada as a region, but I wonder why there is no US? Do you intend for "all world" to be mainly US?

The search results are a bit cluttered, you might want to think about what parts of the results are important to your users and stick the rest in a "more info" box (shown on mousover, perhaps) or something.

The results aren't quite as good as other search engines, but since it is community powered it should improve over time. A search for "blog hosting" revealed no relevant links in the "voted results", but most of the top 10 results were relevant. Did you build your own index, or do you use an API? If its your own index, I am impressed with the quality of results, considering you don't have the resources that the search giants do.

I have added your CSS fix, thanks for your tip. I would have to do some changes to the results Slider and the overall results display. SansJ: Sans-Junk (that's the idea :)) Most of the search results come from a search API (that's why the index is pretty decent), did not think of adding US until you mentioned it! You are right about "Voted Results" getting better as more people start using the site.I intentionally decided not to tweak the search algorithm as that would be contrary to the idea of Social Search in my view. I did to try to experiment on this page :http://trk7.com/ask/mysearch3.php?sstring=blog+hosting&submit=&co=all , check it out, one can move the slider to left to display less reults that are more relevant.

The slider is really useful and cool (I like the effects as well), I did not see it the first time around. You might want to add a description of some sort so that people don't miss it or get confused about what it does.

I am submitting my site again for your review/comments, as a lot of work has been done on the site since the last time I submitted the link to my site and I thought it deserved to be mentioned here again.

I'm confused the instant i view it. Is it about carnivals? The graphics/colors are so intense and disorienting i'm too distracted to type anything. My first response is another Google copycat interface, except now with a tag cloud. Tell me what using your search will do for me. ;-D

Carnivals...the last thing on my mind while coding the site ;)...I personally, got used to the colors and kinda started liking it.The color and style could be changed with little effort and it will.What is interesting about the site is, I have been noticing some traffic from Google and most of the results are in the front page. eg:(look for trk7.com/ask/) http://www.google.com/search?q=online+quick+and+easy+image+resizer&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=dialup+troubleshoot&hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&start=30&sa=N

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=lucene+with+php&btnG=Search

Although, not ground-breaking, if used correctly, this kind of search site can actually enhance search results in Search Engines like Google.

I don't understand what problem this site is addressing. Why combine reddit-style voting with search engines? What is the deficiency of "traditional algorithmic-based search engines" that SansJ corrects?

As I understand it, traditional search engines already use the feedback of which links people click on (I think they used to mangle the links in order to be able to track this, but it seems that at least Google has now switched to some JavaScript trick.) If the goal is just to improve search quality (and this may not be the case, I'm not sure), then whether you'd reach that goal will hinge on whether you can get more accurate information by letting people vote explicitly, and after they have already seen the page, rather than implicitly, and after they have only seen a short summary.

The answer to your questions are available in these articles: http://searchengineland.com/070403-040029.php http://www.interactivedaily.com/2007/02/20/social-search-engine-startup-idea/ and to a lesser extent here: http://www.trk7.com/blog/sansj/a-democratic-approach-to-internet-search/

The paging is annoying. Yeah, it's "cool". But UI experience and techie coolness are sometimes distinct.

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