

Bottlenose, the now engine - wslh
http://bottlenose.com/

======
slurgfest
This is going to be a tough critique, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that
the product is being attacked and should go away.

"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.

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jrussbowman
Hi, first off I really intend this post to be constructive, if you feel
anything I write is taken negatively rest assured it's more a fact I'm better
at working with systems than I am at communicating with written word and
having it accurately reflect my thoughts.

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
:)

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switch33
Isn't this startup kind of screwed from the start if one of the competitors is
that 17 year old kid who invented a new search engine called apodora?

Source: [http://matadornetwork.com/life/17-year-old-invents-new-
searc...](http://matadornetwork.com/life/17-year-old-invents-new-search-
engine/)

~~~
watty
How is apdora related?

~~~
switch33
It lets you search ANY small text item like a feed from not just twitter, but
it also indexes ALL conversations under just the limited amount of characters
similar to how google does searches which can include things like RSS feeds or
facebook posts. It doesn't rely on finding just hash tags or an single twitter
API.

In my opinion if the kid puts up his search engine anytime soon this startup
is as good as dead for at least it's search engine competitive advantage. The
dashboards and some other things are rather nice.

------
pinko

      Ooops, something went wrong
    
      We had problems contacting one or more important data sources.
      Please try again later.
    

Clicked on "Details" and was told:

    
    
      We had problems contacting one or more important data sources.
      Please try again later.

~~~
bratsche
I had this happen for some searches after it had already begun to render what
appeared to be some relevant data to the page. It cleared the data it was
beginning to render. :(

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zoop
So I went to make an account and it requires that I link it to a twitter
account of facebook account. I didn't want to do that, but now whenever I
visit this site I'm forwarded to /setup which is the page prompting me to link
an account.

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CountHackulus
Maybe add a "safe search" option for the pictures? Definitely got some NSFW
pictures when I was searching for yoyos. (World competition is in a few days,
wanted to see the trends.)

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majke
Another cool application of SockJS. Looks great.

