

I made a 'search engine' for fun - vu0tran
http://foobub.com/
This was a weekend project for fun. The problem I had was I felt like existing search engines were too cluttered and I couldn't easily sort results by websites.<p>I experimented and rather than returning so many results, it returns the results from a few number of websites and tries to rank in on a confidence level from that smaller subset.
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vu0tran
The website isn't meant to be used for any real utility. What I wanted to
demonstrate was just an alternate way to look at search.

I think we've just gotten so used to Google and its millions of results; I
wondered, what would happen if I took that all away and presented only just a
small handful of results?

~~~
tomasien
That's kind of exactly what I saw, and despite the lack of utility, I was like
"Oh! This is nice!"

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DividesByZero
Sometimes minimal is best. Then again, Google does have the 'I'm feeling
lucky' button - maybe that ought to just display a few results for them?

Either way, nice experiment!

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dave5104
The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button doesn't actually work anymore. :(

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bencevans
Yep however now you type what you want, it works some ajax magic, press tab to
activate the keyboard shortcuts then hit enter which takes you to the first
result.

I use it without thinking about it now and I don't need to touch the mouse
bearing in mind I'm on the keyboard typing the search.

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clone1018
Add <!doctype html> and do <input id='search' name='s' placeholder='Type then
hit enter' type='text' autofocus>

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vu0tran
Thanks for the suggestion. It's in!

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clone1018
No, thank you! Much more usable now, there's also a couple other markup
changes that need to be done, planning on open sourcing this?

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vu0tran
Yeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.

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drhayes9
Try open sourcing it before it gets unshitty.

I'm trying it myself, just putting things out there and saying "to hell with
it" because, ultimately, unshitifying things is Zeno's paradox kind of work;
you're never really done. And, really, it's probably better than you think
anyway.

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clone1018
The urge to move his <script> tags from under the <html> tags is killing me D:

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vog
Vu0tran, as you can see, others would be more than happy to help you with
"unshitifying".

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jbranchaud
I'm confused, if this is a search engine, where are all the ads?

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mehulkar
haven't hired the mbas yet :P

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hnriot
you made a search engine _client_ , it's very different. A search engine is an
index atop a corpus of content that you crawl.

It might be useful for you to look at jQuery Masony library for your
presentation.

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vu0tran
Yeah, I knew I must have been missing something. That's why I put "search
engine" in quotes. :)

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nickmolnar2
Are you crawling these sites yourself, or using the Bing API to get the index?

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vu0tran
I'll get into more detail with a blog post tomorrow, but I just used
Yahoo/Bing. It was a 3 hr project, figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel
:)

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photorized
Are they charging you for requests (over the initial allotment of 5,000
requests per month), if this is done via Bing Web Search API in the Azure
Marketplace?

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blefloch
When the search term is one character long (e.g., a single quote, or an
ampersand, or whatever), it would be nice to get the corresponding Wikipedia
page if it exists. It's pretty much impossible to google for special chars.

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ctdonath
Searching for "foobub" on foobub.com gives
<http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub> \- clarification please?

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vu0tran
My site does not SEO well.

If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e.
<http://foobub.com/?s=cats>

If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most
likely:
[http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20...](http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20and%20everything)

If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you:
<http://foobub.com/?s=foobub>

My website is not yet self-aware. No need to worry, guys.

~~~
jaredsohn
It is unfortunate that doing so takes you away from the site (I imagine the
basic use case right now is to type in a bunch of queries to see what it
displays.)

Ideally, it would show Google search results in an iframe, although I imagine
that is against their TOS. Maybe just linking to Google search results would
be a better experience.

~~~
eru
Or you can use a similar deal to what duckduckgo does.

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nsxwolf
This just redirected my search to Google. Edit: I see, it's a feature not a
bug. My search results weren't found by foobub.

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nedwin
I thought this was going to be a search engine for things that are fun.

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indiecore
That'd be interesting. Maybe scrape twitter/facebook/etc for stuff correlated
with "fun" and related words?

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tomasien
This is by far the thing I've upvoted on "new" that I'm most surprised reached
the top page. I think this is borderline definitive proof that PG is right:
Google is vulnerable. I mean, just the simplicity of the results has Hacker
News excited, I just think 2 years ago we wouldn't have found this the least
bit interesting.

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znt
Is there a way to exclude websites from results? Such as Quora?

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orangethirty
Well done. I like how answers are given as tiles. Its a good experiment to try
with nuuton. I do not like, however, that you did not serve too much from the
classic search UI/UX. Shoot me an email: my username [at] nuuton [dot] com

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tomasien
I don't hate it!

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vu0tran
Big surprise! Thanks! :)

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mochizuki
It keeps telling me an apostrophe is the number 39. No, but seriously it looks
neat. What are the websites it queries for results? I've seen Yahoo! and
Wikipedia so far.

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vu0tran
I replied to this above. Just:

'Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.'

Stackoverflow comes up when you do coding questions, yahoo answers when you do
just random questions. Although, Quora doesn't appear as often as I like. I
need to do a bit of tweaking.

Here's an example where Quora comes up: <http://foobub.com/?s=vu0tran>

~~~
codezero
Pretty cool, I actually searched for Quora as one of the first queries and was
surprised it showed up, now I see why!

I'm impressed with the results for most (obviously not esoteric) searches.

One thing: lots of URLs don't wrap or truncate, so you get some overflow,
example: <http://foobub.com/?s=how+is+babby+form>

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jere
Neat. So it just searches wikipedia?

If so, I can't really complain. 95% of my searches are followed by "wiki"
normally so I can get wikipedia first.

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Katelyn
I thought I was the only one who does this. There should be an easier way..

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pirateking
I used to append "wiki" to >90% of my searches as well. Finally got in the
habit of using DuckDuckGo bang syntax now.

    
    
      w! <query>

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bad_user
Chrome and Firefox can do this too and it's easy so I don't get the reliance
on DuckDuckGo for it.

In Firefox you go to the wikipedia page, right click on the search text box,
then "Add Keyword for this Search". In Chrome, you do the same thing, right
click on that search box and then click "Add as Search Engine".

You can add whatever keyword you want, like "w" and from then on, all searches
with "w " as a prefix will go straight to Wikipedia's results.

I have shortcuts defined for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Amazon.com, IMDB, a
dictionary for my native language, my personal Gmail, my work Gmail, Google
Translate and Hacker News.

For instance for Hacker News, I often want to search for articles I've read
here, not to mention it's a valuable resource for getting other people's
opinions on certain subjects. So instead of searching on Google for:

    
    
         some topic site:news.ycombinator.com
    

I defined a prefix for this search "hn", and so I simply type "hn some topic".
You can't use the shortcut for this though, you'll have to go to Settings and
manually add a search engine setting.

For Google Translate, I basically type "enro phrase", for translating "phrase"
from English to Romanian, while I type "roen phrase" for translating "phrase"
from Romanian to English.

Can DuckDuckGo do that?

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mintplant
Huh. This is actually rather good for programming searches; surfaced some
useful things I hadn't seen before. Bookmarked. Thanks!

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s_m
You might want to sanitize the placeholder attribute on the results page - in
its current state, it is susceptible to XSS.

~~~
vu0tran
Thanks for the tip. I was trying to remember what XSS was.

<http://foobub.com/?s=xss>

Bam. Foobub.

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kami8845
Hey, what does the backend look like?

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vu0tran
Hi, since there seems to be a lot of interest, I figured I could answer all of
them at once in a blog post which I'll post sometime tomorrow.

To answer your question though, the backend is running on Python. There's no
particular reason. I just find it a lot easier to script with. It's running on
fCGI with nginx on the backend server. On the front is PHP... which is served
through up by apache. I find it easier for me to do $_GET, hack around forms
really fast and also just echo Javascript everywhere.

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pgrote
Odd. The auto complete in Chrome shows me the WordPress extensions I have
installed on my sites.

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state
It's nice to think of a search engine as something that can actually be tuned
to a desired output. Nice to see. You're absolutely right that we have come to
think of this problem as solved, and it isn't.

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srkiranraj
Neatly done... It's a great hack in 3 hours... Would love to learn about it,
if the code is open sourced. Only one suggestion, results could be listed
neatly. That's it.

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hackerlass
Neat, would like to see the code. If you're crawling sites yourself, that
would be really interesting. Nice work.

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havemurci
I did something a little bit similar when I made www.eaisy.com. I like a
minimal interface.

~~~
sjmulder
That’s really nice. My only gripe is that I find the definition font really
hard to read.

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jusuchin
Youch... inline styling and javascript outside of the closing </html> tag..

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Ramario
The simplicity of this makes it enjoyable. Great work!

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chuppo
You hijacked my middle-click to open in same tab instead of another one. Gah!

Otherwise, very good work. I was suprised it can even do simple sentence-
search.

How did you make this, what is the backend?

