HN Explorer

61 comments

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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.

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

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.
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.
richardbrevig
I'll report back once this is done. It's back up.
josephmx
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)
richardbrevig
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
No search results appear, how is this better than Google again?
niuzeta
I think being in front-page of hacker news broke the site.
spdionis
Good job, the service looks very nice. Unfortunately I didn't get a single relevant result for my query...
richardbrevig
Thanks for trying it out!

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

spdionis
I tried "Facebook eBay shop" and "Facebook eBay store import".
jpatokal
Um, what exactly are you looking for? Businesses that import eBay stores into Facebook...?
spdionis
Yes. Not a big business sure but hey...
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.
johnnydoebk
How does it work? Looks like David Blaine street magic. I'm getting pretty good results even if keywords are really poor.
cstavish
This is really good. Turned up some extremely relevant yet non-obvious results.
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.

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!

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

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! :)

dirkdk
Set up a Paypal Donate button so we can chip in for your hosting costs
mastermojo
Its already set up as a software-as-a-service for $29 a month.
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 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]

xasos
Wow this works great! I tested it on a few random company ideas I had, and it returned very relevant potential competitors.
ch4s3
Seems to be a little lacking for companies in health IT.
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. :)

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!
mangeletti
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.

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... ;)

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