WebMynd (YC W08) Makes Your Search Engine Smarter With New Browser Plugin | Hacker News Reader

WebMynd (YC W08) Makes Your Search Engine Smarter With New Browser Plugin

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41 pointsmoses140019 comments

Hm... Take this as a suggestion/loud thinking rather than criticism:

Generally I don't experience the lack of results, i.e. mixing up flickr, wikipedia and usual google's output isn't appealing to me. For instance I can always force wikipedia results by adding "wiki" at the end of my search. Same with youtube, etc.

The issue I'd like someone else to solve is the opposite: show me LESS instead of more. Oftentimes my search strings look painfully long, only because I'm trying to filter stuff out. A typical example would be googling for anything purchasable: fake review sites, web stores and commercialized "blogs"/linkfarms are all good at playing this game, and finding a real PHPbb form where photography people are talking about a particular lens or a monitor is becoming harder and harder. The same goes for bicycling equipment, computers, nearly everything. The only searches I find satisfying are mostly about history/wikipedia/programming/science.

Google isn't interested at solving this problem: their business depends on merchants being happy, whereas users don't need 2 pages of full of buy now!! offers staring at them after every search query.

Basically I want more intelligent version of typing: "high quality LCD -buy -price -cnet -bargain"

More information about this launch on our blog - http://blog.webmynd.com

The main points are:

- We're now focused on building personalized search applications on top of the existing search infrastructure, rather than just web history (though that is still part of it)

- Launched an Internet Explorer extension

- New sharing features in the Firefox extension

- Supports Live Search and Yahoo as well as Google

- Custom browser extensions for publishers (e.g. the HNSearch one for Hacker News)

- New demo page so you can try it without installing: http://www.webmynd.com/demo?query=economy

Here's my simple attempt at a similar idea: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/41872

It puts a search of my del.icio.us bookmarks above my google search results.

Definitely seems interesting, though as staunch said, the barrier to installing a new plugin is significant.

I wonder how Google feels about the widgets covering up the Adwords ads in the right column. Enough people start using it and that could impact their revenue. Is there even anything they could do about it? Maybe they would acquire the company, or just clone the best advances in search interface for themselves.

I also wonder if some of the widgets might be redundant. Wikipedia and YouTube, for example, are already heavily represented in search results. In the screenshot TC posted a few results are duplicated.

Wikipedia and YouTube are actually the most popular widgets that users add to the search sidebar when we do not include them by default. That surprised us too since those results are usually surfaced well be Google.

We think that grouping the results by source actually makes it easier to filter through the mass of information - you usually know where you are most likely to find the information you need, it just seems easier to go to Google to do the search.

Flickr and Twitter results are other popular sources to add.

the webmynd dock is remarkably useful. It's a pity it doesn't open previous clicked links in a new tab, rather than current window.

Seems like it could be useful for a researcher or something. It screams "vitamin" to me. I'm very reluctant to install a new plugin. It has to be very compelling and this just isn't (for me).

We actually think that trying to get people to change their behaviour to keep going back to a different search portal is a greater barrier than getting them to install a plugin once and improving their experience on their current search engine.

Even if we can improve the search experience on Google just a little, we think it could be huge. And the lowest hanging fruit seems to be the RHS of the results page - there must be better uses for that space, especially with screens getting larger.

I think you're right that a plugin install is smarter than trying to get people to stop going to Google. I think you need to make it very clear why it's worth installing the plugin initially. Something concrete that we all wish Google did.

Reassuring people that the plugin is lightweight and won't compromise their security is also very important. The history recording might be great, but it sounds creepy.

I don't know if it's true, but a dark themed web site might not be a good idea when trust is important. A/B testing on install ratio?

Good points.

We've de-emphasized the history part though have kept it in the product since some of our users really love it. In the latest version you can completely disable the recording elements (you could always turn recording on and off).

Interesting thought on the dark background. I hadn't thought that the color might influence trust in that way, but definitely worth testing.

>We've de-emphasized the history part though have kept it in the product

I would default it to off, otherwise, pretty evil.

Our install wizard asks the user whether they want the history component or not since we figured it's best not to make any assumptions. History is only one part of the product now - that's what I meant by 'de-emphasized'.

I've always hated that analogy. Tylenol isn't the only profitable drug; Centrum Silver makes plenty of money too. Vitamins are perfectly respectable business.

How do you know a vitamin actually does anything? How do you know it actually contains the vitamins it says it does?

Selling a Vitamin is a considerably harder sell than pain relief.

I dunno, I've bought more vitamins recently than painkillers. It's common to take a daily multivitamin, few people take daily painkillers[1]. The vitamin industry makes plenty of money; dietary supplements are big business. Not that painkillers aren't, but there's nothing superior about a painkiller in an economic sense. There are whole stores devoted to dietary supplements, the most popular painkillers are illegal (heroin, opium, etc.).

Some links for the size of the vitamin market vs. painkiller markets:

The largest vitamin company makes $80 million a year in profit: http://www.foodnavigator.com/Financial-Industry/US-vitamin-s...

The total spent on painkillers in the US is $11 per person, which comes out to about $330 million gross, which probably means less than $80 million total profit: http://www.euromonitor.com/Specialist_products_to_revive_ana...

[1] Except aspirin, which is being taken for its blood-thinning effect rather than its analgesic qualities.

oh, and its a pity it doesnt work with my search engine (duckduckgo) -- can't there be any collaboration between two Hacker News projects?

Last year they asked people to tell them what search engines to include:

http://blog.webmynd.com/2008/10/29/new-release-of-webmynd-pe...

Why not just ask?

I want the widgets embed in duckduckgo, rather than duckduckgo embeded in Google.

A few people have asked us for the widgets independenlty from the browser extension. We didn't announce it in this release but we're close to being able to do this. I'll be in touch...

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