
Show HN: Find your competitors that Google can't - richardbrevig
https://rivalseek.com
======
1arity
I am completely endorsing this. This is actually really good.

I did 6 months of research, and came up with 120+ companies in the space and
20+ serious competitors, and in typing in a single, pretty poor, keyword
approximation to the project, I discovered a new competitor using RivalSeek (
and all the others they listed I was aware of ( and they were in my 20 ) ).
Dead set.

How do you do this?

Someone needs to back you. This works.

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samcheng
We seem to have killed it (at least, my search terms resulted in an
interminable loading screen).

Please, people, lay off it while they can figure out some scaling!

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pmelendez
It would be interesting to know how much traffic we need to estimate before
submitting a website here, so creators can be prepared and warned.

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gabemart
Stuff I've had on the front page before has received somewhere between
300-2000 simultaneous visitors, and between 10,000-80,000 total visits.

~~~
cperciva
My experience has been pretty close to that; if I hit #1 then the peak is
usually around 500-1000 simultaneous visitors according to Google Analytics,
and the total number of visits is around 30-40k. Being around the middle of
the front page is around 200-300 simultaneous visitors, and a correspondingly
lower number of total visits; I don't know if I've ever had less than 10k
total visits from a front page link.

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mangeletti
I had to try it:
[http://cl.ly/image/1c3X1h2D0z1S](http://cl.ly/image/1c3X1h2D0z1S)

[https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=find+compe...](https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=find+competitors)

It seems there is a pretty major bug (see the results and their domains), but
nonetheless RivalSeek is apparently supposed to be at the top, which if
natural (not hard-coded), is pretty cool.

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tomkwok
And Google's competitors are ... Googles.

> google.com.my, google.com.tj, google.com.sl, google.ac ...

[https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=google](https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=google)

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bkmartin
Pretty nice. When testing this out I was getting multiple entries of the same
domain. Once I added it to my landscape there would be a couple more in the
list and I couldn't get rid of them. Very interesting tool.

~~~
richardbrevig
Thanks for trying it out!

To fix that issue (remove the duplicates), click twice on the keyword/checkbox
at the top of the page beside "add search term." That will reload the list
freshly from the server.

The issue comes from a lag in updating your selection of relevance on the
server, most likely caused by the demand being placed on the server right now.

Thanks again. :)

~~~
bkmartin
Seems to be quite popular right now. I really like the idea and the execution
seems very solid from a UI standpoint. Best of luck. I will keep my eye on
this to see where things go.

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johnnydoebk
How does it work? Looks like David Blaine street magic. I'm getting pretty
good results even if keywords are really poor.

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dirkdk
Set up a Paypal Donate button so we can chip in for your hosting costs

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mastermojo
Its already set up as a software-as-a-service for $29 a month.

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andymcsherry
So I entered HipChat, and it told me HipChat, Atlassian, Jira and Bitbucket
were our competitors...

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richardbrevig
Hello Andy, thanks for giving it a spin!

Searching for "HipChat" will find companies that have a relationship with
HipChat. If you're looking for HipChat competitors, I suggest searching for
something like "private group chat" instead.

Sorry this wasn't very clear, I'm going to try changing the search form a
little to make it more intuitive.

Thanks again for the feedback. :)

Edit: Would this placeholder text in the search box be more clear? "search by
keywords..." Thanks.

~~~
andymcsherry
That kind of worked, 1 was HipChat, 1 was somewhat relevant, 2 were social
networking products and the last was "Free XXX Webcam Chat, Sex Cams and live
swingers"

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cstavish
This is really good. Turned up some extremely relevant yet non-obvious
results.

~~~
richardbrevig
Thanks. I'm glad it worked for you. :)

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ychantit
Really nice app I got good results. Can I ask you a question : How are you
doing to get website traffic for competitors ?

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middleman90
"Using data from Alexa, we're able to compare estimated website traffic for
each company" from their blog [https://rivalseek.com/blog/2015/07/01/dollar-
shave-club-comp...](https://rivalseek.com/blog/2015/07/01/dollar-shave-club-
competitors-razor-shaving-landscape/)

~~~
ychantit
Thank you. Is this data free ? How reliable you think it is ?

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spdionis
Good job, the service looks very nice. Unfortunately I didn't get a single
relevant result for my query...

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richardbrevig
Thanks for trying it out!

What was your search query? I'd like to investigate why, if I may. :)

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spdionis
I tried "Facebook eBay shop" and "Facebook eBay store import".

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jpatokal
Um, what exactly are you looking for? Businesses that import eBay stores into
Facebook...?

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spdionis
Yes. Not a big business sure but hey...

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rootedbox
You would think that "rivalseek.com" would appear at the top of a search for
"seek rivals"

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hanniabu
Found some issues. Idk if it's because it ran out of suggestions or what, but
when I did my search and then stayed going through the suggestions to refine
the newer suggestions, I fairly quickly got to the point where there were
repay suggestions. However this was not the problem. The problem is that when
I hit the not relevant button, it went away as it should, but when the
duplicates came up and I hot the not relevant button again, the button would
get highlighted but no action was taken. Didn't realize the issue was because
they were duplicates until after I noticed it happening with a few more I
recognized.

Edit: Overall, seems really great so far. And I forget what tags I search, but
I was typing in obscure combinations where I didn't think I'd get any hits

~~~
richardbrevig
Thanks for trying it out, and I'm glad you like it overall!

One of the great things about RivalSeek is that it only shows you a competitor
suggestion once. After you've decided relevant/not relevant, you won't see it
again. If you subscribe, it will keep this memory and only alert you of new
potential competitors it's not shown you before.

The issue you describe is because of a lag between your browser and the
server. To fix it: click on the search term with the checkbox twice (by the
"add search term" link). That will manually pull a fresh suggestion list from
the server.

Sorry for this bug, should have it fixed soon. And thanks for your comment! :)

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mangeletti
This is really cool!

I had suggested a different solution to the same problem @
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778766)

I really like the solution that RivalSeek created, and it removes the lag of a
Q&A format.

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chinathrow
"By clicking "sign up," you agree to your credit card immediately being
charged $29."

So far so good. How about terms and conditions and a privacy policy?

People would love to know what you do with their data before one signs up. You
could be selling search terms to rivals... ;)

~~~
fiatjaf
You believe those?

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esistgut
Doesn't show anything next to the big "Is this a company you'd like to
compare?" arrow. As for other recent threads on HN maybe it is time to rewrite
something with Rust... ;-)

~~~
richardbrevig
lol, I'm getting ready to re-write a lot of it. Just rewrote some parts of it
and it seems like it's getting things back under control. It's lagging a
little but not freezing.

Just made these changes a couple minutes ago. So try your search again. If
it's still not showing anything, your search phrase may be too specific. :)

Thanks for trying it!

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avalaunch
Site doesn't appear to be loading right now.

Can anyone tell me what the site does?

Thanks.

~~~
richardbrevig
Hello, thanks for checking it out.

You can see a 30-second video of the app here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TEgUb33sU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-TEgUb33sU)

1) enter search term 2) identify competitors 3) view information on
competitors

I've had to take the site down temporarily again to resize the disk space (it
actually ran out of space!). The prior times I only increased RAM/CPU so it'd
be quick. I'll post again once it's back up! :)

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tobltobs
Great results. I thought I would know all my competitors, but I missed at
least 30%. I would love to know how you are doing it (so I could try to rival
you ...)

~~~
tobltobs
Did try another search with "pdf compress". There are a lot of pages showing
up with a "Free Downloads" title. They are all false positives I think.
However, there are still mostly relevant pages, some I did not know before...

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vertis
It's an interesting idea, though I'd rather put in company names than keywords
and have you tell me who is working in the space.

For example, if I search with a variety Real Estate keywords I can't seem to
make Zillow, Trulia, RightMove, Realtor, Zoopla, auction.com,
realestate.com.au, casa.it all come up together (and these are just a handful
of the "portals" I know exist and are definitely competitors).

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sosuke
I'd love to be able to provide you with a few competitors that I already know
of and then have you give me back the ones I missed. Cool product!

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bbali
How are the search results sorted? I expect them to be sorted by size of the
competitor, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

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xasos
Wow this works great! I tested it on a few random company ideas I had, and it
returned very relevant potential competitors.

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bliti
API available? It would be nice and reduce resource usage due to people not
having to crawl the page. If you need help building the api let me know

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mtmail
It seems to return better results than alternative.to (or similar), crunchbase
and angellist for the queries I tried.

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philliphaydon
I have no competitors. I think. Or its broken. On mobile so will try tomorrow.
Hope it works. Love the idea.

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ch4s3
Seems to be a little lacking for companies in health IT.

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richardbrevig
For what category? What was your search query?

I put together a landscape for a friend the other day and within an hour had
identified the top 100 electronic health record/electronic medical record
vendors. :)

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dmarlow
Doesn't seem to be loading for me.

~~~
richardbrevig
Thanks for trying it out! :)

I just re-wrote some of the code that's made it 2x more efficient, so it
shouldn't freeze now. Try it again.

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wpcoder
No search results appear, how is this better than Google again?

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niuzeta
I think being in front-page of hacker news broke the site.

~~~
richardbrevig
Temporarily. It's back up. :)

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cenal
Helped me determine that no one is doing what we are up to at my startup.
First to market as far as we know. Platform launches on August 30th but you
can sign up early at [http://www.joinjune.com](http://www.joinjune.com) if you
want to be assured of being in the beta.

~~~
vertis
[positive helpful] You're not really competing against just 'pay people to
speak to recruiters though'. You're competing against any recruiting platform
or professional network (e.g linked in).

You have to consider them for many reasons -- e.g. if you have any success,
your more established competitors are well positioned to add that
functionality.

Doing a keyword search for 'recruiting platform' and 'professional network'
turns up plenty of potential competitors. [/positive helpful]

