Show HN: Find your competitors that Google can't

by richardbrevig • 11 years ago

189 61 11 years ago

1arity• 11 years ago

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.

mtmail2• 11 years ago

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

samcheng• 11 years ago

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!

pmelendez• 11 years ago

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.

gabemart• 11 years ago

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.

mtmail2• 11 years ago

Another project that posted their traffic numbers it got from being on the HN frontpage. Looks like 300 sessions/hour, 2000 total for them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10072660

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

I'll report back once this is done. It's back up.

josephmx• 11 years ago

I got 8.5k in the first day of a post here, which was less popular than this post (I saw something like 150 sessions/minute when I peaked at #6)

general_failure• 11 years ago

We got around 18k hits.

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

That was bittersweet. Was on a small digital ocean droplet. Wasn't expecting such a large response, so I'm really happy. I've upgraded the droplet so hopefully everything continues to work now.

wpcoder• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

Try again. Took a minute to reboot server.

niuzeta• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

Temporarily. It's back up. :)

spdionis3• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

Thanks for trying it out!

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

spdionis3• 11 years ago

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

bkmartin2• 11 years ago

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.

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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. :)

bkmartin2• 11 years ago

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.

johnnydoebk• 11 years ago

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

ychantit2• 11 years ago

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

middleman90• 11 years ago

"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...

ychantit2• 11 years ago

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

cstavish• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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

dmarlow• 11 years ago

Doesn't seem to be loading for me.

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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.

esistgut• 11 years ago

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... ;-)

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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!

philliphaydon• 11 years ago

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

avalaunch• 11 years ago

Site doesn't appear to be loading right now.

Can anyone tell me what the site does?

Thanks.

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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

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! :)

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

It's back up again. Try it now. :)

dirkdk• 11 years ago

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

mastermojo• 11 years ago

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

cenal• 11 years ago

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 if you want to be assured of being in the beta.

vertis2• 11 years ago

[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]

mangeletti2• 11 years ago

This is really cool!

I had suggested a different solution to the same problem @ 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.

xasos• 11 years ago

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

ch4s3• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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. :)

sosuke• 11 years ago

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!

mangeletti2• 11 years ago

I had to try it: http://cl.ly/image/1c3X1h2D0z1S

https://rivalseek.com/search/index.php?searchterm=find+compe...

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.

tomkwok• 11 years ago

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

chinathrow• 11 years ago

"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• 11 years ago

You believe those?

rootedbox• 11 years ago

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

tobltobs2• 11 years ago

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 ...)

tobltobs2• 11 years ago

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...

bliti• 11 years ago

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

bbali• 11 years ago

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.

andymcsherry2• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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.

andymcsherry2• 11 years ago

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"

hanniabu• 11 years ago

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

richardbrevig14• 11 years ago

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! :)

vertis2• 11 years ago

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).

Show HN: Find your competitors that Google can't

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