

Ask HN: What do you think of my project? - noaharc

http://www.searchekko.com/<p>It's like a "related articles" widget for blogs, but it uses visitors' HTTP referrers to target the related articles.  (It only displays to visitors arriving from a search engine.)<p>I'm sure it's a little rough, but I'd love to hear what you guys think.  Thanks!
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daremon
Nice idea and the implementation seems good. I am tempted to use this on some
of my sites.

Some questions:

a) How does it work? Lets say I have a recipe site and a visitor arrives from
Google having searched for "steak". How do you find related articles on my
site?

b) What if my site isn't indexed? (e.g. new, blocked etc)

c) The widget has 8 actions (links/buttons etc). 2 of them point to my site
and 6 to yours! I would prefer something like 7 to mine and 1 to yours :)

d) Certainly add some options. The "Looking for more on", "Or try a new
search" and the 3 related keywords should be optional.

e) The 480px is very limiting. I can't put that in a sidebar it has to go to
the main area

f) The site copy needs a redo. I could not easily grasp what it does, how it
works etc.

Great work overall - I hope my suggestions are well taken!

~~~
noaharc
Thanks for the feedback!

a) I use the Yahoo BOSS index of your site to find other pages that would fit
the search query well.

b) If the site isn't indexed then SearchEkko just doesn't display the widget
at all.

c) Haha well it certainly tries to give the site owner front and center real-
estate. It also displays up to 4 results, if they're available (not shown in
the demo).

d) Excellent points. It's early -- I just wanted to see if there was any
demand for the product before I spent too much more time on it.

e) I don't think that it really works very well in a sidebar. It would be hard
to display the other hits attractively, and I don't think it as noticeable to
the visitor. I played around with it, and 480px seemed as short as I could
reasonably go.

f) Good to know. It's something I've been working on, and I'll try to clarify
it.

Thanks again!

------
learnalist
Your demo, had me a little confused, but based on your oneliner and other
peoples comments it makes more sense.

That said...

Great little concept.

* If your majorly concerned about dodgy injections of referrers. Might be worth taking a leaf out of bit.ly and linking a system to filter out urls based on something like <http://www.surbl.org/>.

* Maybe even include the ability to offer unique things to visitors from wherever they might have just come. A unique article only they can see, whom knows.

* What sort of reporting could / would be good for the site owner?

~~~
noaharc
Good point on injections of referrers. I'll make sure to sanitize them before
doing anything. Thanks!

------
jacquesm
That's a really nice idea. Immediately I was wondering how you'd deal with
refeeral spam, then I noticed your 'from search engine only' bit.

That does make me think there might be a fairly easy way to spam your service
though: find a search page where page of spammer ranks high, do lots of visits
from botnet to page of target with referring url search engine page.

You'd think that these are 'related' pages whereas in fact no such link
exists.

You'll have to guard against that somehow, check back on the search page and
see if it is really related or if somebody is spoofing the referrer.

~~~
noaharc
Thanks for the feedback! In its current implementation, the widget actually
only displays other articles on the installed site (that way it's more useful
to the site owner). And each visitor's arrival only affects the widget as it
displays to them -- they don't affect how it appears for other users.

There's a demo here: <http://www.searchekko.com/demo>.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah ok, that makes it a bit more solid.

edit: couldn't resist temptation to play around with it :)

I see how it works now, that's nifty. So, basically you're taking the search
query, you retrieve the search terms and then you fish up a bunch of urls on
the local server to try to capture the user longer.

This should have a measurable effect on time-on-site and bounce-rate stats.

You should do an A/B test for sets of pages with and without the widget to see
if those variables change measurably (outside of statistical noise range).

That way you can get yourself a unique selling point.

~~~
noaharc
Yep, I definitely hope so. Just emailed you too

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cschwarm
This is indeed a good idea! Congrats.

You may like to improve the copy on your web page. The first thing that's not
immediately obvious is what links are displayed. It might be better to write
"it uses their individual search queries to display _additional matches from
your site_."

And you may like to change the image on the front page. Nothing wrong with
stock photos but this guy looks as if bouncing makes fun. I don't think that's
the impression you want to create.

~~~
noaharc
Thanks for the specific suggestion on the copy editing. I'll definitely try to
make it clearer.

Also a good point on the photo. It's about the only "bounce" stock photo I
could find... I'll poke around and see if anything else might work, though.

Thanks for your suggestions!

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recurser
Great idea! This is just a random thought, but I wonder if there's some way
you could incorporate the google sets API that was posted recently to get
'related' articles from the search terms if you don't get any results
initially.

~~~
noaharc
Interesting thought... I'll definitely play around with it and see if I can
make it work. Thanks!

------
Flipparachi
That's a pretty sweet idea. I like it. Hire a good web designer to give it a
Web 2.0 look, and look for a $ 2 million in VC money :)

