Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=344697

by cosmok • 18 years ago

1 7 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have been pondering about upgrading the interface on my search site and looking for some ideas/pointers here.

So does anyone here have links to a good search site that they have come across or someone here has a mockup of a search site that they would like to share?

arnorhs• 18 years ago

google.com

(somebody was bound to eventually ;D )

PieSquared• 18 years ago

Well, actually... that takes me to my iGoogle pages, and you know, with the latest redesign... * starts bitching about minor unimportant things while ignoring the general benefits of the iGoogle homepage redesign :D

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SingAlong2• 18 years ago

"google.com" a one url reply. That should crack everyone up.

An ideal search site would have one input box and a submit box. And maybe the logo too :D After the data is input, the design that comes to my mind again is the linear results displayed by most search engines (except cuil). This is the part where you can make a difference. If you don't mind about the business model (or in specific ads) currently, then use the space on the right side too. Use it to display thumbnails of the page. And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc). Any medi in the page like mpg, wmv, asx etc can be mentioned in the results. Coz if a person is searching for just test then that can be useful.

Also the thumbnails data I mentioned are of much use when doing quick surfing. I wouldnt want to endup on some page that isn't readable.

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cosmok2• 18 years ago

'And along with the common search data shown by other search engines, you could also display data about the media in the page and even the type of page(flash or html etc)' Can you elaborate? Google does display type of link for a few formats (pdf, doc, ppt, etc..), are you suggesting to recognise more media types or just show the info about the site?

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makecheck• 18 years ago

ht://Dig (http://www.htdig.org/) was my favorite back before Google was big. It hasn't been updated since the rise of Google, but it is still a very configurable, nice search engine.

Google Custom Search is probably the best bet for any site. It has a free mode for free organizations, and an ad-supported one otherwise.

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Ask YC: Have you come across any good interface for a search engine?

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