Show HN: A new search engine UX I've been working on in my free time
swurl.com
swurl.com
Edit: 2nd suggestion / feature request: add ability to 'pin' columns to a position.
3rd suggestion / feature request: ability to add scoped google columns, I would love a column that has `site:stackoverflow.com` prefixed to all searches in the 2nd column.
I will be coding a bunch of these suggestions today! What changes were you specifically needing? Just turning off Instagram? Sorry, the 1st comment was edited, so not sure what you would like.
- The possibility to add a column for google search with flags, such as `site:stackoverflow.com`
- the poossibility to rearrange the order by which columns are displayed
Thanks a lot for the heads up and congratulations on creating such a cool UI ! I showed it around at work and everyone loved it ;)
Ok I've added a way to disable Instagram and Twitter. Is there other ones you'd like disabled? Or are you wanting to set specific ones to always show?
Right now the ones shown are automatic and dynamic. It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search. This opens up the idea of doing things like knowing you are looking for a code problem and showing stackoverflow results in the 2nd column.
I mean those are 2 very different design directions. Auto vs manual... Are you super thinking a full manual version would be good? I've found people generally use things more when it is automatically good.
I'll have to think more about this. A number of people did bring this up...
Please don't do that. It messes with muscle memory. Either have columns always in fixed order or let me customise the order. Google search has dynamic order and while usually Images link is the second one in upper row, sometimes it moves Maps there resulting misclicks. Terrible UX. There are very few cases where dynamic UI makes sense, but IMHO search is not that.
Right now I'm thinking about the pinning and ability to add any site. Kind of tricky to implement design vs simplicity wise.
Ok I will definitely add an option to turn off Instagram and Twitter. Is there anything besides those? Not sure I want to add an option to turn off anything, trying to limit the complexity and number of options.
Pinning... could you give me some examples of columns you would always want pinned to the front vs dynamic based on relevancy? Or some example queries? That would be super helpful. I like the pinning idea though! Just need some help thinking about this.
So on scoped google columns, that is basically how it is being done right now: https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort Usually google search with site: is better than the site search itself. But usually I customize it a bit if it is helpful. Stackoverflow is already there, and reddit. Is there any other specific ones you would like? I can code it really quickly.
My recommendation is to show everything by default and let the user "uncheck" the source for now. In phase 2 may be, you could make that a User level setting/default.
One source to add: HN :). For example, I know some very well known people are very active on HN. It will be nice to pull their comment history right there :). For example, "cloudflare CTO".
Not show how I could trigger that... any thoughts? I would need to correlate that search with a person, then know that he is super active on hackernews and find out the unique username. Problem is hackernews maybe isn't SEOed super well, so your profile doesn't show up in the results....
Let me know if you have any ideas on how....
I'd appreciate being able to create custom search profiles (like Brave Goggles).
If I'm searching for a famous person, I might want Wikipedia, Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, [music streaming service(s)], Twitch, and YouTube results.
If I'm searching for medicine, I might want Wikipedia, PubChem, MedLinePlus, and Examine.com results.
If I'm searching for a question, I might want StackExchange, Reddit, Quora, and Consensus.app results.
With my regular searches, I might prefer a different search engine than Google, a different microblogging website than Twitter, etc. Maybe I'm boycotting Instagram and don't want those results to show at all?
What sources does the news tab use? Maybe it's extremely biased? Let the user decide! Maybe I want different news source profiles (one for serious, less biased sources; one for satire; one for local news; etc.)?
What about localization? FASS.se is a popular medical database in Sweden, so I'd like for those results to be displayed in my medical search profile.
It would also be cool if the results in the Google column automatically filtered out the results available in the other columns. I mean, since I already have the Wikipedia results in its own column, I don't need the Google column to hand me a Wikipedia link.
I'll stick to Brave search for now, but it's a cool tool!
I immediately thought in profiles as a nice extra feature when I saw this. And I even thought that it can be done automatically based on your search query without the need for profiles, I think it would be difficult to implement though.
Maybe is the future of searching, who knows!
I could code things where if something shows up in Google results, it triggers another column of content from a specific source. Just need some more examples of what people are looking for.
The first ones that come to mind are:
- Searching for travels: I might want TripAdvisor (things to do and top restaurant pages), Youtube, Images, Skyscanner, Maps, Booking, Airbnb. Ideally, I would want some blogs with places to visit and things to do, but I understand there is no single good source for this (as far as I know).
- Searching for restaurants: I might want TripAdvisor, Images, Maps, The Fork.
- Searching for tech in general: StackOverflow, HN, Youtube, TechCrunch, Medium, IndieHackers.
- Searching for learning: Udemy, Coursera, FreeCodeCamp, Youtube, Google Scholar
In the examples above, I just mentioned some examples that could be useful to me, the key thing (as I mentioned it in another comment) is to be able to customize these columns, both in source (add/remove) and order, plus the width of these columns. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with a lot of awesome ideas for profiles.
I really think this could be a great search engine experience.
Search profiles. This is a good idea. But could add a lot of complexity and options to fiddle with. I'm trying to just code stuff that adds a tons of value with the least code, basically efficiency. Which Goggles/profiles would you want/need? Would help me to think about this. Trying to figure out the best way to improve this without a bunch of work/settings from the user. Maybe there is a way to solve this automatically by understanding the objective better somehow.
Wooo, love the search type examples, especially the medicine one. I'm not in medicine, so that is super helpful to know. I will be working on those ideas this week. I will prioritize added sources most people are asking for here.
What different microblogging website do you use? I will be adding a way to disable Instagram today. Been getting a lot of requests for that.
I'm just using Bing rss for news. It is the only good API that has images included for news. If you have any other suggestions for better news APIs, I'm all ears!
There is localization and some language support based on browser language/country settings. If you change that in the browser, Swurl uses that info. Never heard of FASS.se, I'll take a look. Do you have any example searches where you would really like to see FASS.se shown?
On filtering out duplicate results, I agree that is a bit redundant. But I'm thinking it should stay because on mobile you can only see 1 column at a time. It is a design quirk that could be improved... not sure what the best way is.
Brave search is really good. I wish they would open up their search results with an API, I'd switch to using them as a search source!
Artem at newscatcherapi.com
1) Dark Mode please
2) Toggleable websites; I saw that the websites I was seeing were black-circles in the panel below the search box. I instinctively tried to click on youtube to not see youtube box. It would also be nice to have a global panel where users can choose if they never want to see a certain website.
But these^ are just me being super picky. Overall, a great UX.
On toggleable, that is interesting feedback. It is a bit different. I wonder what made you feel like it was a toggle... The clickable round circles is a bit like iOS calendar. So it shouldn't be hugely unfamiliar. I did try playing around with different button looks before. But I'll think about this problem... thank you for bringing it up :)
What columns would you not want to see? And may I ask why? So far the comments have been mostly an option to turn off Instagram and Twitter.
As for implementation, it should be easy to allow users to remove any boxes, right?
PS : As for the clickable round circles, if there is a list with some black circles and others white, it just feels very intuitive to click on a black circle to make it white. It could be that I don't get this because I don't use iOS.
I did just add disabling Instagram and Twitter, does that help you? You can set it in the dropdown menu on the top right.
Do you think I should add Youtube? Youtube is pretty popular with most people.
Ahhh, yes. I understand what you mean with the black circles looking at it that way.... I was thinking it would be ok since iOS calendar has black circles as primary. I did remove the circle border I had around the white buttons to try to make it look weaker. I could make it colored, to maybe make it feel better. What would you do to fix this?
Yes, thanks!
Do you think I should add Youtube?
No, you are right, youtube is very popular.
As for the circles, honestly, I don't know. Since nobody else mentioned it, it could be that only I have that problem. And in that scenario, you can safely ignore it. If more people complain, maybe they will have the perfect solution.
Since you're committing to a horizontal scrollbar, why not increase the size of columns and position the content so it feels like I am reading/looking _down_ (from top to bottom) not everywhere all at once.
Also, a better scrollbar design would be nice + individually making sure each column can be understood where it is from. In other words, some kind of a heading indicator. (You already use Icon + Source name but I feel it isn't enough.)
Maybe you already got all this planned out and you're busy with the algorithm stuff instead, if that is the case - sorry.
It should look pretty clean, unless you have a browser that always shows scrollbars. What browser and operating system are you using? I think Windows and IE might show scrollbars more. Should look good on majority of popular browsers like mobile and Chrome. But if you give me more details I can look into how it looks on your side.
I did try adding a stronger header look before... but it ended up looking too busy and heavy. Right now I'm trying to lean towards minimal and clean as possible consider the amount of data going on. If you can give me a mock up of what you are thinking I would love to see that!
Yes will be trying to improve the UI more. Please try it more this weekend and let me know any more advice you have!
Speaking of it, you can rule out any column you don't wanna see by appending a couple of rules into uBblock like these swurl.com###twitter swurl.com###instagram swurl.com###youtube swurl.com###news swurl.com###images
If enough people ask to open source that is possible.
Just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you!
As far as UX goes another little thing I would suggest is making the flexbox columns grow instead of shrinking so that they properly utilize the entire width of the screen and as a bonus spice you could contemplate about dynamic column width where the primary column (first or possibly hovered one) is proportionate to the rest of the columns in tandem with the golden ratio. I found golden ratio is indeed a really pleasing analogy from vim splits to tiling windows widths or practically everything.
If not for making the columns disproportionate you should definitely make them utilize more of the real estate as they kind of hinder usability and UX when shrieked.
Good luck with everything buddy!
But for me personally the preview of the next column takes up just a little too much space. Coupled with the fact that the active column has no white space on the left and is off center makes it feel a little cramped. But I think this could be solved with a little tweaking. The overall layout looks and fells great.
I am using Kagi at the moment, but were I to use Google I’d definitely consider using this.
Thank you very much for your spacing feedback. What device are you using to browse? I could try making the column a bit more wider and more spacing... It is a big tradeoff between information density and spacing.
Maybe give it a try for a week and let me know if you get use to it? It will take a bit of getting use to, because the density is not like most other search engines. For example Kagi only has 1 column and a bunch of empty space on both sides.
I will need to be thinking more about spacing... thank you!
I could probably get used to the main column being off-center pretty quickly, so it's really just the width of the right column.
Keep the Instagram results. It's very useful.
What do you mean? The whole point is that I can search Instagram here without an account.
Why not let the user decide, which columns to show? You could start with a default, non-intrusive set which the user can expand as liked.
For most of the other people in my life, they are primarily searching for products, books, people, and ideas for recipes or various projects around the home.
So I totally see the utility of having these social media sites in the feed.
On the other hand, this reduces privacy even more than stock google, basically broadcasting your search terms to a whole bunch of bad actors, so I won't be recommending it to anyone.
Generally Swurl is super private compared to visiting 99% of all other websites out there. But please let me know if there is anything you think I should add/change to make it more private for you, without hurting speed and costs.
google.##.g:has(a[href="pinterest.com"])
add this to your ublock origin.
The new Arc Browser[2] also has something similar implemented as a boost[3] (boost are short snippet-like extensions).
Just goes to show how less reliable Google Search is becoming because of ads and bot results. Platforms like reddit (I append 50% of my searches with "reddit") bring a more human touch. Totally agree with Paul's thoughts on reddit[4].
[1]: https://hyperweb.app/desktop [2]: https://arc.net/ [3]: https://arc.net/e/2CADECD1-9839-4057-9EA9-A9988ABC4B92 [4]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1360263618508521480
Obvious question about Google (and the others I guess): are you in breach of their Terms? How are you scraping results? How can you require people using this that it will continue to exist, or is it a proof of concept?
Personally I'm not a fan of endless scrolling. I never know if I've reached the end. It's also somewhat of a "dark pattern" to encourage attention.
Finally, on one search, the Instagram column contained 100% broken elements, they were the browser's default error message. My connection may have failed or something. Anyway, there was no option to refresh just that column, or individual broken elements.
Looks good though, nice UX overall.
Off topic: anyone else remember when dogpile was the new hotness? :)
I am using Google directly through their paid API, so it is official and legitimate. Not scraping. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
I understand infinite scroll isn't for everyone. I will add a pagination option later. We have been using and optimizing infinite scroll on my other website picclick.com for many years. People usually like it if implemented well. I understand it isn't for you though, that is valid.
Yes Instagram is done by an instagram embed, and sometimes Instagram blocks aggressively. What browser are you using. I could test it some and try to figure out why it isn't working for you. Is your browser blocking Instagram embeds?
Great to hear that you think the UX is good. It is pretty different, so I am really wanting to know if people find it comfortable and understandable. The idea is in the future the amount of different columns and content in the columns would get better and support more search types. We do have reddit, stackoverflow, and others right now. But we could add a bunch more in the future for shopping, travel, coding.
I remember dogpile and using it. I think I was more on Altavista at that time.
For Twitter, I'm just using a simple url check pattern for now to trigger it. It isn't perfect, but works well enough for now: /^https:\/\/[a-z\.]*twitter\.com\/[^\/]+$/i
Yes there are thoughts for even more column types like github, or imdb. But often the meta isn't that great, or there is no API, or no good embeds. Seems like websites are more closed off now vs in the 2000-2010s.
I don't usually use Arxiv. Do you have some example queries where you would like to see a Arxiv column?
Also same with HN? That is a bit of a harder one. I guess I could trigger a HN column if there are tech news type results returned from Google.
I've been just seeing people swiping for more on snapchat and tiktok, thinking that UX design must be good to use for evolving something else. And hit upon trying it for search.
Let me know if you have other specific search columns I should add!
Edit: it’s over there on the right. I just missed it initially. Swank!
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/technology/gen-z-tiktok-s...
Some comments:
- it seems like the order of the columns is not consistent across searches?
- I'm on the laptop and the columns extend past the edge vertically - I can scroll but it's not ideal. I expect this isn't a problem on a bigger screen.
- personally I don't care much for the Amazon and Instagram streams, although that might depend on the user. It certainly depends on what the search target is (any way to figure out if there's a near-perfect match with an Amazon product?)
- In general I think I'd like to see Wikipedia results first, but again, depends on what kind of search it is.
- (on laptop at least) it felt a little bit too dense, IMO, but I like pretty minimalist UIs.
Nice work!
Would you prefer the columns to be consistent, vs dynamic based on search? Google web results are always first.
The order of the columns is based on the Google result ranking. The Google results usually trigger the column ranking generally. For example Wikipedia will only show if Google returns Wikipedia in the first 10 results. Same with pushing Instagram order up. So it is trying to show you relevant columns depending on the search. It is only as good as Google is at it.
What is the resolution of your laptop? I can test it to try to see what you see.
Yes it could feel too dense. It is a tradeoff. I could make it more minimal, but less info will show. I'm trying to make it as consistent/uniform/hierarchical as possible to make it feel less busy. It is very different, I am hoping people could get use to it and then like it better... but I may be wrong there.
I've been using this pretty heavily for the last couple of days and I am liking it with the exception of one issue which is becoming a deal-breaker for me: it defaults to opening a new tab, which means that back isn't useful. I could always close the tab, but I have that burned into my muscle memory. Since the shortcut for opening a new tab is also an easy one for most people (cmd-click) it seems unnecessary to force it, IMO. Your call, though :)
Wikipedia will still need to be 1 of the first 10 Google results to trigger the Wikipedia column though.
Hrmmm, that is a great idea. I like it. Do you have an idea of a good source for that? Is there a website you like for discovering the unexpected? I guess maybe something like 9gag? https://9gag.com/search?query=747%20airplane
Here are instructions on how to default it on Chrome https://swurl.com/default.html
I am hoping the swipe to see more columns of searches will open up a whole new direction allowing more specific searches to be seen quickly. You could just swipe between different modalities. And possibly jump to narrower ones like just looking at reddit or stackoverflow, or php documentation (need to add that later).
edit: I saw that it is possible to move around using the top left buttons but I find them inconvenient
Yes please incorporate any ideas you like.
I do think or hope search will eventually be free and everyone will have access to a good free search API.
I'll check out mwmlb deeply in the morning!
One little thing: In my opinion the labels 'Google', 'Wikipedia', 'Twitter', etc. don't need to be fixed on mobile since you already have to icons above it and it does take up a bit of vertical space.
Other than that a nice concept.
That is a really good UX optimization find. Yes on mobile, since it is just 1 column at a time, I could remove the title label.
The label does help to anchor the column a bit more clearly and gives consistency between mobile-desktop. What do you think about that? Is the extra few pixels height more valuable? Really value your opinion!
I'll try coding it up tomorrow morning and see how it feels!
I only had time before to test it on mobile on my commute. Having seen the desktop version now I understand your concern. Maybe there is a way to just reduce the size of the information a bit but still keeping it structurally as is? I also think that most people can identify the source of the information just based on how it is structured (longer texts for wikipedia, youtube/twitter/reddit with its own branding, etc.) but we would need more opinions on that.
Google Search has abandoned any pretense of finding new areas of search.
Edit: presumably https://web.archive.org/web/20110205055647/http://desktop.go...
I will use it for sure with some additional and essentials features for me at least:
- Ability to add and remove some columns: I have no interest in using Instagram or Twitter in my search results and I have interest in using Stackoverflow or HN for example.
- Ability to customize the width of each column for desktop: I have read in your about us page that you clearly state that “Mobile is primary”, however I would be interested in using it on my desktop on a daily basis and it would be nice to have the google column wider than the others for example.
- Possibility to customize the order of the columns: I think this is an obvious one.
Do you have any of these changes in mind for the future?
Congrats!
Ok just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you! Stackoverflow is there right now. Not sure how best to trigger HN, let me know if you have any suggestions on that. Probably not good to show it all the time.
I did test the Google column wider for a couple of weeks, but ended up changing it the same as the other columns. Design wise it came out that consistency was a lot more valuable for UX. Let me know after you use it for a while and get use to things, I will reconsider adding this if it still would help you!
On ordering, you mean manually? Right now I am trying to do that all automatically without thinking or manual settings, and trying to optimize for relevancy. Let me know more about your problems or ideas here.
For changes, right now based on all the feedback, seems like I should consider more sources, sort options, and dark mode?
I'm going to give the Google results column with the same width a try, maybe you are right. I think it also depends on the specific user’s screen size. In any case, I would recommend you let each user decide the width of the columns.
About ordering, yes, I was referring to manually, but I hadn’t thought in automatically mode tbh, but based on relevance it is probably best as you mention now that I think twice about it. I don’t know how easy or hard is to implement this feature the right way though, it may even depend on each user specific search habits, but it just a thought.
And regarding changes, yes, those would be the must-have, highest priority, and most valuable features you can add imo.
I also like @alfnor's suggestion for custom search profiles which could lump together specific sources for specific searches. Maybe a Premium option for a fee?
[Edit: also maybe an option to lock different columns together, so you can scroll them together to save scanning time?]
Yes I have seen a few mentions about searx, will look into that!
Quick question, in your example you did "Paul Graham y combinator". I then tried https://swurl.com/?q=breck+yunits and it worked great, so I thought that I was lucky that my parents gave me a UUID and my results worked better than PG! But then I tried your original query except without "y combinator" and the results were just as good (clearly PG is most famous PG by far). So was curious why you added the "y combinator"?
We need to take back control of our feeds. I think the trifecta of user control is - filtering, ranking and UI. Any of them can be used by big corporations in shady ways. Your meta search engine is already a new UI and allowing multiple sources empowers users. But we need more than that, something like customisable neural reranking or recommender systems that serve the users, not the advertisers.
What types of searches are you into? Could you give me some examples to think about, that would be very helpful. Thank you!
I’m not sure how I would want results re-ranked for me. Maybe some limited promotion of geographically nearby things?
I am already using such a system for scientific papers search.zeta-alpha.com, they do embedding based ranking and recommendations based on bookmarks and tags. It's 2022, I expect high end neural ranking. I even implemented such systems on my own, I know exactly how hard it is.
For example I searched on your site "Focal Loss", and I get news about "Former Longhorn Poona Ford Shines in Win over Arizona Cardinals". Search "Softmax Activation" and get "How to activate an eSIM on your iPhone". An embedding similarity filter would have rejected that, it's not even in the same ballpark.
It looks great on Safari, though! Though I do echo the sentiment that it would be great to allow customization - let me choose the columns I want and where I want them in a layout panel.
If you have some more examples of queries where this is happening, that would help me improve things!
If I enter "voxel", the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th are all duplicates of the wikipedia image.
The 2nd and 24th are copies of that doomguy image, but that's not nearly as severe.
Looking over a couple other searches, it seems I was wrong - it really is mostly wikipedia cropping up in the "images" tab over and over.
* I think what many commenters really want (myself included) is the way to configure the list of sources (what they are, and in what order).
We’re building a search engine to search across cloud providers. Shoot me an email if you envision any opportunities for collaboration.
I immediately felt... this is the best search interface I've used yet.
I love that I can switch between images and regular search without the extra clicks and forward and back navigation.
Didn't see if you had a news source as well, but imagine that is perfect as well.
The only problem is, I don't know how you move forward from here.
I see alot of other comments saying how easy and intuitive it is, so confused why I get nothing and can't figure out how to get something.
What searches are you doing where it doesn't get anything? That would help me figure out what looks wrong, thank you for the feedback!
However this is literally GQ magazine implemented as a search page which overwhelms the user with irrelevant information.
That's why old Google was cool: clean and relevant. I don't see anyone looking for efficiency (not social media but a search page) would want to change that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rumq8/y_combi...
lol
Also, give the option to customize in which section to search, I don't care about images results or youtube, give the option to deselect the defaults option.
If you give me some more examples, I will add them. I am seeing a lot for hacker news. But how do you think it should be triggered? Show all the time, or show only in certain cases?
For industry things, it would be super helpful if you tell me some exact ones since I'm not in all industries, so I would really know first hand. Thank you!
Perhaps if I logged into swurl, I could set a column to custom search one or multiple websites using a "site:" appended search (like others have mentioned)
Startup sources, that is good. I could do that!
I'll look more into insurance.
Keep it coming! Love your good examples and sources.
I'm trying not to do a logged in experience right now. People really hate logging into things and figuring out options. I mean, it is a really low percentage and usage compared to the amount of coding work... But please think out more, I'll be thinking on these things!
Nice work!
Would definitely be open to collaborators, will need to figure that out later. Today need to code a bunch of features :)
Uncaught TypeError: data.queries is undefined web https://swurl.com/?q=google+translate:1179 jQuery 6
But no blocked requests.
If it still isn't working, could you let me know the exact URL you are looking at? And browser you are using?
// API callback webgoogle({ "error": { "code": 403, "message": "Requests from referer https://www.googleapis.com/ are blocked.", "errors": [ { "message": "Requests from referer https://www.googleapis.com/ are blocked.", "domain": "global", "reason": "forbidden" } ], "status": "PERMISSION_DENIED", "details": [ { "@type": "type.googleapis.com/google.rpc.ErrorInfo", "reason": "API_KEY_HTTP_REFERRER_BLOCKED", "domain": "googleapis.com", "metadata": { "service": "customsearch.googleapis.com", "consumer": "projects/blabla" } } ] } } );
But I understand if google doesn't want to allow devs to get access to their cards.
I could try to add some with some more feedback
Very inspiring to see something as old as search engine UX being rethought and redesigned, congrats!
Yes that is the idea, people are already searching multiple sources. I was just thinking of how to do that better with a good simple UX.
Let me know if there are specific other sources you would like!
The dynamic columns based on search are cool. Not sure if you are learning from clicks, but that would be cool. Tradeview price data is cool, not sure if intentional or a nice side effect. Twitter results seemed to not be working, but I see they are there
Thank you for the encouragement and feedback!
Yes clicks would be cool. I could add that later if Swurl gets more click data.
Tradeview, you mean the stock price chart? Yes that is a widget we added.
Twitter results is actually done with a Twitter embed. Maybe you have some iframe blocking thing turned on? What browser are you using? It should work.
So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it.
But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
The big win for this site def seems to be provider selection. Plus reordering.
Would also appreciate some security assistance. The main reason I use Kagi is speed, the second is privacy. Adding more search providers reduces privacy, unless there is some nice proxying involved.
Need to check this out on desktop… it’s great on mobile!
And allow the user to remove sites, such as Pinterest, from the search results.
I would totally be cool with swapping out other search engines, but You.com and DDG don't give any a search API, so can't do that. If you know any good other search engines that I can integrate with an API let me know :)
uMatrix is awesome as it disables any 3rd party domains and only loads content from main domain that author controls. it also allows blocking by content type. Like iframes.
I believe some blockers designed for telemetry blocking, like ghostery or privacy badger, will come with js shims. So they will block google tag manager, but will load a replacement JS to make sure the page doesn't behave in a broken way.
uMatrix is more general purpose and does't do shims. Saying this, website should detect telemetry didn't load, and either still work, or display error saying why it can't proceed.
And for your reference, i enabled googletagmanager in uMatrix, but it still got blocked by uBlock origin. I suspect even if i were to disable both uMatrix/uBlock origin extensions, then my pihole would still block it.
As per using caching proxies , use dns cname. So security conscious people / paranoid configurations know that the caching proxy is in your control and wont leak cookies from other domain accesses. So define something like pix-cdn.swurl.com or static.swurl.com .
* Sources customization (e.g., I'd remove IG, and add a few more search engines)
* Columns order (e.g., drag-and-drop would be neat)
* Padding between columns
Thank you for your wise advice! I will have to choose carefully what to do and what not to do.
Not working on my Firefox though (Ubuntu). Had to use Chrome for this one.
Hrmmm, I don't have Ubuntu. What version of FF are you using? Did everything not work, or certain parts? I know Firefox seems to block embeds.
It would be cool to be able to sort results descending by date.
It would be nice if the user could manually toggle which results to show. For example for most searches I may only want to enable Google and Twitter results.
The design thinking I'm going right now is less options to figure out and click, and just make it easy to jump to any source, and do the best possible to show ranked and relevant sources. What do you think? Would love more input and ideas on this!
Me as a user I usually prefer more options and customizability.
"Jaguar" gives confused results - some try to cluster results, some give the car, some give the car.
There is right now autosuggestions, that could help suggest a better query to begin with. Is that ok for now?
Or what would you suggest to better improve this? Would love your thoughts on this.
I don't think Google shopping has an open API, if it did, would love to add that. Right now we do have Amazon and eBay, and will try to add more.
Yes we do want to add more relevant columns from other websites. Let me know if there are specific ones that would really help your searches.
Awesome you will try it for a week. Would really value your feedback, and will try to code any changes you would like.
I would make this may default search UI, particularly if I could integrate it with MacOS and Chrome. Great work.
What browser are you using?
Notes:
The back to top button is covered by the URL bar on Firefox mobile.
Also next page/column preview is too wide imho
I made the columns a bit wider than before. I tried even wider, but when I did, it there is a line where it is too wide, especially on desktop. Where seeing more columns is better, or seeing more of a hint/peek is better. Please try using it some more regularly and let me know if you get use to it, or not :)
Do you think if it was 100%, then people would still understand they could swipe?
I'll be thinking more about this feedback and will test some more. Thank you!
Scrolling to the next section works well but scrolling to a previous one feels too sticky now (requires too long of a swipe to the right for me at least).
What a great project, I'm really enjoying it. Well done!
Ok will test some more.
The problem is kinda Firefox actually. Swurl is using this newish css snap feature, but Firefox's implementation is a bit buggy. Sorry...
One gripe with this design is that this page can't be scrolled on a PC. Or rather, it can only be scrolled vertically. To scroll horizontally, you need to grab an auto-vanishing single-pixel scroll bar. Although that's not really your fault as much as the browser designers' fixation with minimalist GUIs.
I also think it's difficult to have these many images in an interface, especially brightly colorful images of vastly different sizes with faces. They are all powerful attention attractors, and as a result, and the result is the (excellent) structure of the website doesn't quite come to flourish as much as it could.
But as I said, search UX is extremely difficult. This is a cool new take.
Yes I agree search UX has not been evolving much. I wish it would.
What version of Windows and what browser are you using? How old is the computer? Maybe it is something I could improve. I was figuring most modern computers can scroll horizontally well, but that isn't always the case. But I guess I am trying to push the design into the future...
I think on the desktop the columns could be wider, so the preview text wraps on fewer lines and more results fit in vertically for quick eye scanning.
Did you think about having the ability to display multiple primary search engines besides Google like DuckDuckGo? A while ago I switched to DDG as my default search engine and learned to trust that the search results are good enough. On occasion, I have a FOMO and fall back to Google anyway. It would be a neat feature to have them shown side-by-side.
Another example is Brave Search. I like the ideas behind it, but will not experiment with it as a default engine as an early adopter due to possible friction. With a meta engine like Swurl I could keep having Google/DDG as the primary engine and include other emerging engines like Brave Search in another column to take it for a low friction/risk test drive (perhaps configured through URL parameters).
I would love to have a different search source, but DuckDuckGo and Brave don't give API access to their results. I would definitely add those if they opened up access to Swurl. Know anyone that could help me with that?
So at this point the only viable alternative would seem to be the Bing API.
Lol, I feel like people enjoy content overload or can handle more content at once now. After youtube/tiktok/instagram.
Let me know if there are specific sources you would like added. I am compiling a list of new ones to add.
That would be awesome if you made it default and tried using it regularly! Here are instructions for Chrome https://swurl.com/default.html
Thank you!
Swurl is using Google search right now... so you could just change your default search to Swurl :) Would love the support
I just threw on GA so I can see some basic usage data.
Yes the UX could be used for other search apps. Internal search is a good one, maybe searching a bunch different doc types or internal databases. Good point!
Thank you for noticing and commenting that!
Are you using some incognito or private mode?
Thank you!
Impressive job.
What search is it not showing up for you? I could try to trigger it better.
it's strange, how it's only the twitter column, instagram column once gave me an error message (something about blocking embeds? can't recall) but was at least showing something from instagram, also that went away after a refresh
twitter just has a dull grey background, like the column was left blank or something.
this on edge (inprivate) window, but I face the same error on firefox.
So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it.
But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
well done, very cool and am looking forward to Dark Mode!
For dark mode, are you wanting it automatic based on detection, or a setting?