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Comment by Bromeo | Hacker News Reader

The site has just been taken offline by Drew due to the unfortunate start. I hope we can come back to this once the project has been properly launched, although Drew notes that he is "really unhappy with how the roll-out went" and that "my motivation for this project has evaporated" [1].

Thanks for all the work Drew, I hope you guys manage to come to a conclusion that you are satisfied with!

[1]: https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/048293268d4ed4254659c3cd6abe67...

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Oh, that's sad :-(

For what it's worth, my search engine got prematurely "announced" for me on HN as well, while likewise hilariously janky. I don't think the launch is the end of the world. (I guess I had the benefit of serving comically bizarre results when the queries failed, so it got some love for that)

The bigger struggle is, because a search box is so ambiguous, people tend to have very high expectations for what it can do. Many people just assume it's exactly like Google. It's something a lot of indie search engine developers struggle with. Even if your tool is (or potentially could be) very useful, how can you make people understand how to use it when it looks like something else? Design wise it's a real tough nut to crack, a capital H Hard UX problem.

Drew has the right to cancel his projects, but I really hope others don't cling to the hopes of "the perfect rollout" with their projects.

Startups and side projects are messy and sometimes things don't go as planned. Contracts get canceled, DoS takes down your homepage when you launch losing all those free leads, people leak new features and your sixth deployment erases most of the production database.

There are a lot of great ideas that start out as bad as the first release of thefacebook, AirBnB, Twitch and Youtube. Still, they iterate on these wonky, almost-working sites and end up making something great.

YC pushes this idea constantly; put something in front of people and iterate. Drew was following that advice and I applaud him. https://www.youtube.com/c/ycombinator/videos

The amount of tweaking needed to make a search engine work well can't be overstated either. When you start out, it's inevitably going to be kinda shit. That's fine. Now you need to draw the rest of the owl.

Yeah, I agree. I was certainly underwhelmed with my first small search engine. It was so bad even I didn't want to use it - and I had spent months and months on it.

Still, most projects aren't a search engine. I see people put high expectations on how things will go and often it's just really hard to realize some of those hopes.

Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and iterate. Don't give up.

I think, with search engines, it's best to work with them for the problem domain. It is a fractal of interesting programming problems touching upon pretty much every area of CS, programming and programming-adjacent topics, and take whatever comes out of it as an unexpected bonus.

Well said, my next version will be focused on a niche I actually need instead of general search. Still, I haven't finished studying the CS books + 47 algorithms I'll need to actually implement it.

I love your post. I have to say that my experience is that many in the HN community are not nearly as kind as you. Folks here will rip you apart if you don't have everything figured out :(

So, I started rolling out new features of our search engine on Twitter, Slack, etc instead of here.

Is the source available somewhere? I'm really interested in the internals, regardless of how the "product"/platform/performance turns out.

[edit: nevermind, found it easy enough. Seems to be Go and PostgreSQL with the RUM extension]

Jesus he needs to take it easy. It's not that big of a deal.

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