

Challenge HN: Build a Search Engine - will_brown

Before HN went down there were 2 articles that made it to the front page in as many days with comments overwhelmingly favoring more&#x2F;better search engine competition.<p>Today another post popped up on the front page of HN...this time a link to a <i>new</i> search engine.  Predictably, the comments are overwhelmingly negative, not constructive criticism, but mostly thoughtless (e.g. this will not work; not another social network; this has been done before and bought&#x2F;closed by Google).  To be fair there was a sprinkling of positive and thoughtful critique in the comments.<p>So...I challenge you to do better.  Who am I to judge or challenge?  Well I will say this much, I am an attorney and otherwise what HN would refer to as &quot;non-technical&quot;, but even I launched my own search engine (cir. 2010).  I might not have changed search or even gained traction - I did get tens of thousands of search queries from day 1 and a record of 225,000+ on day 4 - but at least I got the experience of completing something.<p>If a non-hacker can do it, what is stopping you?  If it helps for motivation think of this as an unofficial, unorganized HN Hackathon and build <i>your</i> search engine or at least do not just sit around demanding a new search engine or worse yet tearing down others work (again not talking about constructive criticism).
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pedalpete
I like to think I'm one of the regularly positive responders on HN, and I am
assuming you're referring to Jelly.co as the 'new search engine'.

But... it isn't a search engine at all, it's a photo based Q&A site where
responders are limited to within your social network.

I have no problem with a photo based Q&A site, and about 6 months ago thought
about building one myself (but thankfully I'm too focused on another project).

Seeing as you've called Jelly a 'search engine', and have launched a 'search
engine' yourself, what was yours called? I looked at your previous posts and
saw your OmmaGeo links, but that isn't a search engine.

I'm fine with you challenging others based on their lack of respect for the
hard-work people put into their products and businesses, but please don't spew
off statistics that sound somewhat outrageous.

At the same time, I've built a 'search engine' too
([http://techcrunch.com/hearwhere](http://techcrunch.com/hearwhere)), and it
was my second website (the first was a pandora type music service). Building
any old search-engine isn't that challenging, but building a GREAT search
service is.

Also, no need to single yourself out as non-technical, lots of non-technical
people out there who are helping us technical people find our way to building
great products.

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bliti
What happened to yours?

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will_brown
I stopped hosting it after a year.

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bliti
Do you mind sharing about how it was built (the backend)?

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will_brown
The idea was to build a visually appealing search engine for mobile devices.
Essentially, the text based search results were converted to display the
domain favicon with the ability for domain owners to register and manage their
_results image_ for subpages.

Screen shots:

[1][https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxc3n93dixve2h3/tbook.jpg](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xxc3n93dixve2h3/tbook.jpg)
[2][https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdcucartroj8vbq/tbookobama.jpg?m=](https://www.dropbox.com/s/fdcucartroj8vbq/tbookobama.jpg?m=)

Originally built using Google's API, then redone with Bing's API, this was due
to Google's daily query limits being exceeded.

