Bottlenose, the now engine

"the now engine" could mean almost anything. At first I thought maybe it was some kind of reusable software, like a game engine. Is it like Twitter?

Those little snippets at the top of the page read like nice advertising but don't make it very clear what it is or motivate me very much - I would have bailed at this point rather than blithely running a search, if this were not an attempt to provide feedback... these pages are really busy...

Oh. It is a sort of search engine aggregator thing. So I guess this is in the same general area as Google, Google Reader, Twitter. I guess this is a sort of Twitter-search engine. So what is the advantage here?

The perceived speed leaves a little to be desired - acceptable but not at all enticing. Maybe it's a comfortable way of reading things? Not really, the scrollbar at the right is extremely thin and hits seem to be sort of strewn across a large page. Again, the tendency is for the page to be incredibly busy - like those TV channels with 5 tickers moving in different directions, a clock and a weather indicator.

The purpose of many of these tools is not clear. I don't know what "Sonar" would actually do for me. "Scanner" looks like a rearrange of the same search page. The trending Pictures seem quite boring and random. It feels like all the content is in Now, Stream, Scanner and that these aren't that different in the meaningful information they are presenting to me.

Oh, I can click "New Post." So it is Twitter-like platform too? It wants me to log in to check that out. Never mind.

I wish the purpose of this were more immediately obvious, that it was cleaner so that I could focus, and that it was a fast and ergonomic way of doing whatever-the-task-is.

I'm going down the same path as you. I've been working on my similar site as a hobby for years. I've learned some things along the way.

1: Your results page is very busy with lots of options and graphs. You've actually gone beyond what I've done in the past. The stuff you've put together is pretty amazing and sweet looking, especially knowing how much work it is. However, the feedback I got in the past when I had lots of information on the screen was that it was too busy and intimidating. Honestly, now seeing someone else build a similar product I can see why people felt that way. It's like "BAM! Here's everything, digest it now!"

2: Real time streaming of anything, in my opinion, is annoying and useless. This is an opinion and opinions are like.. well you know. I built a real time stream on my dev box to try it out, it streamed Twitter and Facebook in 2 columns. I searched for "pizza". I deleted the code and html with great prejudice and it never made it's way to my production box. There's a reason the Twitter interface just has a counter for new posts and doesn't actually stream them.

3. Your speed is nice, when I hit the page and did a search. The way you load the page I think is a bit nicer to the user than I'm currently doing. So I'll give you some advice, the way I'm doing it I'm not happy with. My idea is to make the "loading..." almost completely gone. The way I'm going to do this is to Accept http request kick off requests to api/cache return page layout which ajax requests to get the data that's probably already now in my cache

4. Think about the value of all the apis you are using and the information you present. You're doing a lot. You probably don't need to be doing as much as you're doing. For example, the pictures, why? As you built it they seemed really cool and you probably used them a lot. I did when I built something similar for my site. No one else used it. Lots of development time for something no one uses and you're going to support it through redesigns and such?

5. Make this site your primary search engine. No matter what you're searching for, use your site first. This will show you what it's strengths are and then you can focus on those. I determined my site was best for keeping up on topics I was interested in on a daily basis, or for finding product reviews. This is what I've concentrated on now and has really helped me slim my product down into something manageable.

Let me end this with I'm not trying to be competitor to you, and not looking at you as one. My site is a hobby. I've recently burned out and have gone back to building websites for fun rather than profit. It's a huge relief to think "I'll fix that this weekend and if not the weekend after". So I'm sincerely just offering you advice based on my own multi-year experience for developing in the space you're in. I wish you the best of luck, and hey if you make it good enoguh maybe I can just use your site and work on some of my other ideas :)

Source: http://matadornetwork.com/life/17-year-old-invents-new-searc...

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