

WebMynd (YC W08) Makes Your Search Engine Smarter With New Browser Plugin - moses1400
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/01/webmynd-makes-your-search-engine-smarter-with-new-browser-plugin/

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old-gregg
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"

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amirnathoo
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>

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tocomment
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.

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jwesley
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.

~~~
amirnathoo
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.

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pclark
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.

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staunch
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).

~~~
amirnathoo
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.

~~~
staunch
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?

~~~
amirnathoo
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.

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

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

~~~
amirnathoo
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'.

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

~~~
thorax
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...](http://blog.webmynd.com/2008/10/29/new-release-of-webmynd-personalizes-
search-based-on-twitter-boss-and-history/)

Why not just ask?

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

~~~
amirnathoo
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...

