
Show HN: Moocha.io – A search engine for MOOCs - mxeven
http://www.moocha.io
======
radnam
You might want to check out [https://www.class-central.com](https://www.class-
central.com) which offers search as well as reviews.

~~~
Dowwie
I always begin my search with Class Central. It's so useful!

~~~
smartbit
I gave Class Central a try and searched for _Kubernetes_. First, it took quite
a while to load, up to the point I was thinking the site was down. Then I had
difficulty finding the tiny search button located at the top. When I started
typing, a list of courses started appearing, but hitting the blue button _List
All_ returned me back to the home page. I tried for a second time and hit
Enter instead, which presented me a list. Then a very annoying Popup appeared
that I could not dismiss for at least 10seconds how much I tried hitting the
X. This popup later appeared several more times, then the dismiss worked
immediate. The top listed item was an advertisement that was a. not related b.
almost not discernible as an advertisement. I clicked on the third item and
came to this page [https://www.class-
central.com/institution/linuxfoundation](https://www.class-
central.com/institution/linuxfoundation) which wasn't what I looked for, I
probably hit the wrong link with my finger as links are very close to each
other. Went back and now more carefully hit the correct link. It looked
interesting so I hit the big green button only to be greeted by my browser
that _This page was blocked because of a filter_ , at which point I gave up.

I suggest Class Central that they hire themselves a proper UX designer.

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shrikant
"Moocha" is the colloquial Tamil word for urine. I giggled like a child.

~~~
KGIII
Seeing as we are off topic...

It made me think of cow's milk, coffee, and chocolate. I prefer your mental
image and it also made me chuckle.

Sort of on-topic, trends in naming things confuses me. Are we using so many
strange, to me at least, names for things because there are so many products
that we are running out of unique names to use?

I also don't see many descriptive names anymore. Joe's Automotives tells me
that it's probably a business about cars. Even Microsoft tells me that it is
software for a microcomputer. Moocha at least has MOOC in it, though I had to
look up the definition of MOOC.

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scadge
Wow the speed is truly awesome - 125ms for the main page and 169ms for the
search.

~~~
galfarragem
I wonder what's the backend of this app. BuiltWith doesn't detect much.

Edit - I really like the simplicity of search box (no JS):

    
    
        <form class="search" action="/search" method="get">
             <input name="query" placeholder="Search" type="search" required>
             <button type="submit"><svg> ..search icon.. </svg></button>
        </form>

~~~
mxeven
Flask for web framework, Elasticsearch for search. The speed might be due to
the fact that there is no JS / images on the front end.

~~~
vladsanchez
Just had a conversation last night about SQLAlchemy support of NoSQL dialects
like. I bet you didn't use a Model layer. Right? Is there anything you want to
share in that regards?

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WillPostForFood
Had mixed results on my first two searches:

"C#" returns C++ and Objective C classes, several ranked above actual C#
classes.

"Unity" as in the game engine, returns classes on "unit testing".

How are you approaching stemming?

~~~
na85
Similar problem here: searched for "CFD" expecting to see hits related to
Lorena Barba's excellent intro-level fluids courses and instead got hits for
"CAD", "CFT", and "CFP".

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ankyth27
Helpful work. Simplistic UI and fast results. Would love to see some more
websites like khanacademy, udemy etc in the results too. Some filters like
cost/starting in/difficulty level etc. will be helpful in making an informed
decision and I am sure data should be available from the original course page.
Best of luck.

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rexercises
You might want to consider adding filters. We built an online MOOC directory,
specifically for R courses
([http://www.r-exercises.com/r-courses/](http://www.r-exercises.com/r-courses/)),
and noticed that the majority of visitors use the filters we offer. E.g.
finding all courses that are free, aimed at the beginner level, or offered on
a specific platform.

~~~
mxeven
Interesting. I will definitely consider adding filters in the future.

Originally, I just wanted to a build minimalist search engine that just gave
the bare essentials (kind of like Google?)

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the_watcher
I like the minimalism. Filtering is great, but more valuable when you know
exactly what you want. That said, a (very) few filters for the most common
reasons a searcher knows that they require would probably be helpful. Maybe
start with just a free/paid filter?

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hannofcart
Not sure the search algorithms are working as expected. Consider:
[https://ibb.co/iGQQPQ](https://ibb.co/iGQQPQ)

~~~
epimenov
or
[https://www.moocha.io/search?query=basket+weaving](https://www.moocha.io/search?query=basket+weaving)

~~~
sandGorgon
or
[https://www.moocha.io/search?query=ethereum](https://www.moocha.io/search?query=ethereum)

------
javascripton
You also can try [https://coorsy.com](https://coorsy.com)

~~~
degenerate
The search results in this one are much nicer, including the image, course
start date, cost, and current enrollment count. OP, would be good to take a
peek.

[https://coorsy.com/search?query=r%20data](https://coorsy.com/search?query=r%20data)

vs

[https://www.moocha.io/search?query=r+data](https://www.moocha.io/search?query=r+data)

~~~
matthjensen
The course information in the coorsy results is valuable, but stock photos are
a waste of space on a search results page.

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Haydos585x2
Not a bad start at all. I've completed a lot of MOOCs in my time and have been
on the content creation side for online learning as well and it's great to see
another tool help with discovery. I think you should add some featured/random
courses on the homepage, suggested categories would be good too. I searched
"tech" to see what was on offer and got some less than desired results with
many of them being about teaching with only some results there for technology
based topics.

Overall good start and a useful tool. It will be good to see it developed
further.

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dotdi
Being a sucker for MOOCs, this is pretty exciting.

The search algorithm doesn't seem to work right, though. Also, a bit more
information would be nice, i.e. when the next offering starts, if it's paid or
free, etc.

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pkmital
Great idea and hopefully it will help connect a lot of students to some great
material! I noticed it wasn't indexing
[https://www.kadenze.com](https://www.kadenze.com). Is there any chance you
could add these to the listings? We are focused on arts education primarily
but also offer highly technical courses, such as ones in Deep Learning, but
with a practice-based mentality towards teaching. Let me know if I can help at
all!

------
mweibel
Nicely done, might use that from time to time!

I'd reconsider the violet background, it's a bit too agressive and I almost
closed the page immediately.

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antoaravinth
Could someone explain how this works? Meaning, I want to understand how the
application uses the data from several MOOCs and get the result. Is that they
manually build the data store and indexing on top of it? If so, what happens
if a new course is added to the site? Link to source code would be really
great, if you can provide one.

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bruceb
While we have a lot of stuff out of date and FB login is not working at the
moment...but...

will plug [https://www.coursebuffet.com](https://www.coursebuffet.com)

The aim is to group courses from different providers as if they were all part
of one university and you can follow a curriculum.

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some1else
Feedback for the authors: Make it about planning. There are so many great
courses, and no time to go through with all of them. Bookmarking &
organization features can capitalize on a huge oversight by the MOOC providers
(i.e.: there are no bookmarking features on Udacity & Coursera).

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allenleein
Great job! I hope'Popcorn time for MOOCs"is coming out soon too.

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davidzweig
Nice, please also add NPTEL:
[http://www.nptelvideos.in/](http://www.nptelvideos.in/)

Many useful technical courses on there of high quality.

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dayaz36
How is there not any Khan Academy results in any of the searches?

~~~
mxeven
I haven't added Khan Academy yet. However, that should change soon...

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erikig
The autocorrect/fuzzy search is a little too aggressive.

For instance searching for "PHP" or "REPL" yielded results with "PHD" and
"Real..."

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lexsys
How are the results ranked?

It would be nice to have possibility to specify the course starting date like
'in 7 days', 'in 30 days', etc.

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gausaauisuain
How do you index the courses? Use an API per provider? Or scrape the pages and
do machine learning?

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0xFFC
Thank you so much for this wonderful piece of work.

Please keep improving it.

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CaiGengYang
How many users does your search engine Moocha.io have ?

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skhandkar
You might want to check out [https://elearning.club](https://elearning.club).
It offers filters by cost, duration and type (eg. Course, Conference
presentation and Shows)

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rpedela
The point of a Show HN is for the author to get feedback on their project. It
is not an opportunity to sell/recommend a competing product/tool. I am
starting to see this anti-pattern a lot in Show HNs, please stop!

~~~
ben_jones
Is it? I just glanced the guidelines and FAQ (only on my phone) and didn't
notice anything specific to this. Genuinely curious if that structure exists.

Also pointing out competitors might be some of the best advice one could give
IMO.

~~~
dharness
I think there are many ways you could point out a competitor. If a competitor
did something different that's notable I think it makes sense to share and
explain how the OP could learn from that.

Sometimes 1-liners like "Checkout xyz, been around since 2014" seem a little
like an ad leaching off of the original Show HN.

I think it depends strongly on the content and the framing of comment.

~~~
the_watcher
Agreed - part of getting feedback on a project is being shown other, similar
projects that you can learn from.

