

Instant. Customizable. Search. [Rate my start-up] - photon_off
http://www.dashler.com

======
photon_off
The idea here is a page that allows you to search any website you choose, in
the easiest manner possible. To me, that means having auto-complete available
as I type my search, choosing whether or not I want the results in a new tab,
and not having to load the landing page of the site before doing my search.

I've been using this as my startpage for about a week, and it's added a layer
of convenience to anytime I'm in "research mode" about a topic. I can flip
through Google, Twitter, Youtube, etc, and get a good all around feel for the
prevalence of a topic, in a matter of seconds.

The filter function on the left searches through your list of search
providers, but also instantly searches through Dashler's database of sites.
You can specify part of a name, or a tag like "books" or "shopping" or "blog".
(If you have a site you think should be there, please let me. I can add it
right away.) In the "tools" section, you can add/edit/delete the search
provider selected.

You can also add your own search provider. All you need is a URL with a "%q%"
in it, which will be replaced by what you type in the search box.

Try it out, and let me know what you think.

~~~
lhorie
It looks nice but I think I'll stick with slickrun, which saves me the 2s
initial page load and can launch far more things than just searches.

------
pushingbits
Hmm.

Showing tips / help one line at a time might not be the best idea. For
instance if you want to figure out what the filter does, you have to just
click next over and over again and hope that at some point it will tell you.

Otherwise, this is pretty nice. Probably better than using a search toolbar.
Though, I have quicksearches in my address bar for all of these, which means
it's not really useful for me.

For instance if I want to research some programming topic X, I will go into my
browser and type: "g X" -> Ctrl + T "w X" -> Ctrl + T "so X" to open tabs with
searches of google, wikipedia, and stackoverflow (for instance). That's easier
than clicking around on your site.

Now if you could display all search results side by side, it might be more
interesting. And if you could create quicksearches for groups of that... So if
I want to search Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.de at the same time and
see results from all side by side (or in a grid layout if there are more than
3 sites). If you could do that, I'd totally use it.

------
empire29
Interesting concept -- It seems like it might work better as a browser plug-in
though.

If you want to keep it as a web site, I would make the interface (your search
box, browser list, etc.) as unobtrusive as possible (remove all the daed
space, try to move your entire search interface to a bar at the top or left
perhaps, and create a results pane who's vertical scroll bar is flush w the
right side of the screen -- this will create a much more comfortable and
familiar experience for users.

~~~
photon_off
Great design advice. I'll experiment with that.

------
gfodor
It might be a good idea to pre-emptively load the results from all the search
engines so you don't have to wait for each one. Additionally, it should be
obvious which ones get results and the ones that get poor results should be
pared away.

Cool idea tho. You should hire a designer -- the current UI while functional
definitely has that "engineer touch" :) (Not insulting, I have the same
problem!)

~~~
photon_off
How could I figure out which results are good, and which are bad?

~~~
gfodor
Well, you definitely might not end up at a wikipedia article, or a wolfram
alpha search. Beyond that you can try to get smarter about ordering them. If,
for example, there are a lot of "related searches" on google, that might mean
google has worse results. Or, if Google or Yahoo's first result is Wikipedia,
you should rank Wikipedia first.

------
markkat
Cool, I'll use it for today and come back with feedback. I suggest adding
DuckDuckGo, though.

~~~
photon_off
Great! I appreciate it. DDG is available... type "duck" in the filter box.

You can add it to your list of providers by clicking "add" in the tools menu.

~~~
markkat
I think the UI needs attention most. I want to use it, but I want the searches
to be done at once, so I can just skim across the sources. Maybe on hover-
over?

It would also be good if adding a new engine were easier. The language is a
bit confusing. I think there should be an explicit "add another search
provider to this list".

Keep it up! I'll be checking back!

------
kqueue
1\. people don't like iframes with scrollbars. 2\. people don't customize.

------
lukev
I like it. But I'd like it even more if it didn't use up so much screen real
estate. I have a large monitor, and keep my browser windows pretty small
(around 1024x768, which a lot of sites are designed for) Which is fine, but
then the window-within-a-window results get positively tiny.

------
eof
Really don't like that I searched for something, found a link, clicked on it,
and had the whole thing loaded into an iframe that I couldn't make go away
easily.

------
kno
This should be considered more of a side project than a startup.

------
nickl
Load the sites side by side.

