
Show HN: Peekier – A new way to search the web - fivesigma
https://peekier.com
======
lioeters
Thank you for sharing this, it's a great first impression.

\- Clean design \- Fast search results with previews \- Layout options \- User
privacy

On the second visit, I noticed the "tags" feature: it's possible to narrow
down the search results by suggested key words. Very nice user experience.

One idea: perhaps there can be a description of how to set Peekier as the
default search engine (for example:
[https://duckduckgo.com/install](https://duckduckgo.com/install)).

I wonder about the practical benefits of having previews, whether it helps me
find what I need quicker. The movement of the eyes while scanning through the
results feels a little less efficient (scan sideways; look for beginning of
next row; repeat) - compared to scanning a list straight down.

Still, the site is intriguing. I'll continue using it to see how it feels.

Another idea, not so related to the search engine feature: I wish there was an
"explore" page (like on GitHub) to see what's new/popular/etc.

~~~
fivesigma
Thanks. There could be a description on how to set the default search engine
as it is a different process on each browser.

~~~
unicornporn
You should get some feedback on the actual quality of the search results too
:) DDG is plagued with terrible results, at least when localized to "Sweden".
At a first glance, it looks like Peekier gives me Google quality results!

Where do you get your data from? Do you use your own crawlers? I wish there
was a traditional list based search results page too, then I could actually
consider using this. I use Startpage now, but it has some strange bugs that's
been plaguing the result pages for years.

------
drKarl
Another question I have is... who's behind peekier? And how is it funded
(servers are expensive, development costs, etc), how does it make money
(Google makes money precisely because it doesn't offer those privacy
features), and if it doesn't make money what's the agenda behind it?

~~~
fivesigma
That would be me. I thought it would be a cool thing to have - previews of a
website before you visit it - so I built it. It does not make money but its
monthly cost is minimal at the moment.

It is too early to discuss "the agenda" behind it because there is none. If it
catches on and becomes popular enough, I have a few ideas on how to make it
sustainable without sacrificing any of the privacy features.

~~~
drKarl
Have you built your own crawler or do you rely on something like YaCy or
Searx, or in other existing search engines?

~~~
fivesigma
A homegrown crawler is used but most search results are interspersed with
existing search engine results.

~~~
trishume
Do you really do your own crawling for purposes other than image retrieval? Is
it really any good?

I highly doubt that your queries are primarily coming from your own engine.
The results are too good. It has good ranking, spelling correction, super
large indices, and is fast. For example searching
"GTGACCTTGGGCAAGTTACTTAACCTCTCTGTGCCTCAGTTTCCTCATCTGTAAAATGGGGATAATA" works
even though it only occurs on a few pages and as the blog post that string
came from explains, you need super fancy indexing techniques to handle things
like that quickly. You also talk about this as if it is a single-person
project, which makes it even less likely you made all this from scratch.

I like the concept and the parts that you undoubtedly make yourself like the
UI, image retrieval and caching, are really good. This is a great site don't
get me wrong. I just think you should be more forthcoming about where your
results are coming from.

~~~
jdc0589
Totally unrelated:

oh man. My absolute favorite assignment in undergrad computer science classes
involved searching ~50GB of compressed text files containing protein
sequences, to see how many times "ATG" or something occurred.

It was a ton of fun. Minimum requirements were to get the correct counts. Then
it turned in to a competition to see who could make the fastest solution. You
had like 8 machines at your disposal, each with the full dataset, to
distribute whatever you wanted.

I think we did it in 3 languages or so (java, erlang, something else...).

~~~
mmsimanga
You got my interest, care to share a link with the write up?

------
AdamN
Suggestions:

1\. Do a list results view like Google - you're competing on so many levels
that you don't want to challenge standards unless you have massive
justifications that you're UX is better. I don't think the tiles are better
and even if they were a little better it wouldn't be enough to challenge the
paradigm.

2\. Can you (or do you) restrict search results that have a high
AdBlock/PrivacyBadger score? I've always wanted that so much more than I'm
concerned about my privacy vis-a-vis my search engine provider?

~~~
bisby
The list results was the first I noticed. I for some reason thought I was only
getting video/image results. not a huge fan of the results style, though I
could see it working for some.

Second was that I get a TON of results for foreign languages: ie, a search for
"gw2 wiki" results in wiki-de.guildwars2.com wiki-fr.guildwars.com and
ja.gw2.wikia.com .. 3 out of top 10, 5 out of top 15 were non english, and I
dont see anywhere to filter that. That might be an edge case (where 33% of
results are non-English) but it highlights the shortcoming.

On the note of thinking I was only getting video/image results... I dont see
anywhere to filter by result type - which is pretty standard in other search
engines now.

------
jjoe
_Your privacy is of the outmost importance..._

You probably meant to say _utmost_. Outmost could imply a lesser importance or
the complete opposite if read into too much.

~~~
fivesigma
It will be corrected. Thank you!

------
zeratax
That is definitely a very interesting search engine, but I'm personally only
interested if this will be open sourced. Currently I host my own instance of
[https://searx.me](https://searx.me) which is a search engine aggregator,
which only sends the least amount of needed information, it even works with
yacy a completely decentralized search engine.

That said there are some interesting ideas here, but I need to use a lot more
to compare results to google, so far they've been pretty accurate Screenshots
are pretty neat, but can also be distracting. I like what duckduckgo does with
its instant answers, giving me a short answer that doesn't distract the
overall flow of reading.

Edit: searx even somewhat supports ddg instant answers, though very wip.

------
searchengineguy
It looks great! Where do the results come from? Another search engine (a-las
duckduckgo) or is it crawled internally?

------
notheguyouthink
This is really cool! I'm honestly sad DDG doesn't use this, because i really
like them, but i had no inherent "feature" _(personally)_ that i felt was
better than Google Search. This, seems to be better _(assuming the search
results are even halfway decent)_.

I could definitely stand for a "no animation mode", though. Ie, screw the css
animations. They may be nice to make your site pretty, but when i am trying to
ingest lots of results to find the correct one, i want things _fast_. The
animations feel far too slow and cumbersome.

~~~
fivesigma
There is a low graphics mode in the settings. May I ask what browser/OS you
are using? I've tested most combinations and even with the CSS blur it should
be snappy.

~~~
notheguyouthink
OSX Sierra, Chrome, Macbook Pro Retina (.. 2013? can't remember haha).

It's fairly snappy, it's just that any animation just bothers me when i'm
trying to click from link to link to link, you know?

Ie, if i'm using Google, i open tab after tab in the background for any sites
i need to research. That has near instant feedback, no delay. I know it's
different, because i'm not actively looking at the background tab, but
effectively for my use case that is the UX you are trying to replace by
viewing the content in real time, inside your site. So i need to be able to
click, and then click away, with as little delay as possible (instant,
preferably). An animation just gets in the way for that, to me at least.

Note that i am more than willing to wait for the page to load. I'm not trying
to be unrealistic. I just don't want to wait, any time, to popup already
loaded content. I suspect the animation also gives the content time to load
the higher res version, so that i can't say much about. If it needs to be, it
needs to be :)

I'll check out the low graphics mode, thanks!

------
struct
Very impressive project! It's results seem pretty good - what's the size of
the index?

------
crasm
The previews are nice, but they do tend to catch the eye and make it difficult
to quickly filter out unwanted results. It's hard to skim the result titles. I
do like the tiles, however.

The clickable suggestions at the top are an awesome idea. It's an improvement
from having to start typing again to get suggestions.

Overall, this looks polished and well-designed. Competition in the search
engine space is still sorely needed.

------
plainOldText
Suggestion: Start loading more results when I'm scrolling already. No need to
display some text saying I should scroll. It should just work.

~~~
fivesigma
Every time you scroll 20+ CPU cores have to hum away and generate previews of
websites (assuming they aren't cached already). So it's mostly a server load
optimization.

------
soared
I really like the look of this. One suggestion - keep the amount of characters
in the title the same as google (50-60 chars). Most websites optimize for this
length and without it you miss some important info in titles.

Also the description for your site needs to be recrawled :)

[https://peekier.com/#!site%3Apeekier.com](https://peekier.com/#!site%3Apeekier.com)

------
tomw1808
Interesting concept. I am keeping a stack of a few million screenshots from
the newscombinator, but I am not using it. Actually I thought about deleting
them recently because I found the concept of having full-screen screenshots
pretty bad. But now that I see it, I like it.

One question tough: How large is your index? I haven't seen any information on
that, or did I miss anything?

------
libovness
From [https://peekier.com/about](https://peekier.com/about)

"Peekier (pronounced /'pi·ki·er/)"

If it's spelled exactly as it would be if you wanted it to be pronounced
another way, it should be pronounced that way

~~~
comex
I don't get it - how else would it be pronounced? To me it looks like the
comparative of a hypothetical adjective "peeky" (compare "peakier"), or
perhaps a form of a verb "to peeky" (compare "carrier"). Either way, the
pronunciation seems to line up with theirs...

------
nkkollaw
Jesus Christ, though... I searched for "dog" and I'm getting "dog fucks teen
porn video" with porn videos among the most relevant results...

(nope, I don't have weird cookies in my browser and it was an incognito
session anyway)

~~~
fivesigma
Wow, that sucks. Never had anything like that happen during testing. Sorry
about that.

I have changed the default safe search setting to Strict.

~~~
nkkollaw
I don't know, maybe it's wrong localization... I'm in Italy, I see that there
are some articles in Italian.

The link is gone, now—good job, I think it's a safer choice.

------
vtange
Is there a way of turning off the screenshot previews? I don't particularly
need it all the time and I'd imagine it stresses the engine a bit more than
spitting things out in text-based, list format.

~~~
fivesigma
I'm afraid not. It's the major differentiator, otherwise it'd be the same as
everything else out there.

~~~
hellcow
Are you testing the value or user demand for that feature? I agree with the
GP. Screenshots reduce information density, increase bandwidth (load time),
and for me take even longer to visually parse than a text result. That is,
they interfere with what I consider to be the most important things I need
from a search engine. Having screenshots populate over time as they load moves
my eyes around the page and acts as a distraction--at least for me.

Google tested a similar "view a screenshot of the search result" feature a
while back. You'd hover over a result and it'd show the screenshot in a column
to the right. For whatever it's worth, they axed it, although I don't know the
reasons why.

~~~
woah
Hovering over the link to get a screenshot is a completely different dynamic
and doesn't seem to save much time over just clicking on the link and seeing
for yourself. This gives you a high level overview. I just tried it with a
search for some information about linux network drivers and I was able to read
the text on the screenshots without opening any of them.

Also Google is notorious for putting out half-baked prototypes and quickly
abandoning them, so it might very well be that the concept does better with a
more dedicated team. I'm going to give this a shot for a few days and see how
it is.

------
jazoom
That's surprisingly good at finding what I'm searching for. Great work. Now
just get the images loading a lot faster and I might even try to switch from
Google.

------
moh_maya
Cool approach!

If I type in "adult learning", I get no search results at all (no results
found). A slightly different search, "Adult education", gives me the results I
would expect. Ditto just "learning", just "adult"; so I'm not sure if its an
issue in the index, or the strict search filtering..

------
drKarl
How does it compare to DuckDuckGo?

~~~
fivesigma
Well, for one, it shows you a scrollable preview of every website.

~~~
drKarl
I saw that, that's nice, usability seems better than ddg, but what about
privacy? Is it better? similar? worse?

~~~
fivesigma
Edit: If you trust Peekier enough, privacy as whole is actually better because
you don't even have to click on search results on some occasions, simply
because their content is of no interest to you.

More information here:
[https://peekier.com/privacy](https://peekier.com/privacy)

~~~
notheguyouthink
> It is actually better because you don't even have to click on search results
> on some occasions.

Fwiw, i like the site but that seems like a silly assertion. Yes, some sites
could do terrible things with your page visit, but a search engine you
frequently use could do _far worse_ things than some random site i visit once.

Not knocking the product, i just dislike that statement, and feel it should be
reworded. I understand your intent, the sentence just doesn't convey that
accurately, imo.

~~~
fivesigma
Agreed, trust is a hard thing to build but you have to start somewhere. I've
changed my wording.

------
johnmurch
This is so refreshing, loving the layout and simple customizations. Would love
to see a new search engine in the space :) Good Luck!

------
otacorn
Cool, what if adding a timestamp to each result? In Google search I always use
timestamp for filtering results visually.

~~~
fivesigma
This is certainly something that will be added.

------
firewalkwithme
I love it! Keep going. Feels very nice on mobile too. Very good selection of
settings, and right where I want them

------
EJTH
Looks really nice. Id wish that you could change the layout of the search
results though.

------
slig
Is there a easy way to make this my default search engine on Chrome?

~~~
fivesigma
Go to Settings -> Manage search engines -> Other search engines and it should
be there.

