Ask HN: Review our startup, Seekier.com - A search sharing network

Site looks pretty well done but it just doesn't seem like something I would use. I have Facebook if I want to share searches with my friends and I can just copy/paste my wikipedia/google/whatever URL there. I have HN, reddit, Digg, etc if I want to do w/ people I don't know IRL but who have the same interests as me.

Your site is really well done but this seems like more of a feature than a stand alone product. What is the most compelling reason a user would have to use this and not an existing sharing service?

Completely tertiary to the primary feedback being requested, but: Your default avatar (which appears to be a zoom-in of the logo) looks (to me) like a zoom-in of a line drawing of a woman's cleavage, with one nipple showing.

edited: for punctuation

A typo on http://seekier.com/account/signup: "County" should be "Country."

Why isn't duckduckgo in the list!?

Here's my honest opinion; it might be a little discouraging, but don't worry, I'm just some kid typing stuff on the internet.

First, let's discuss the aesthetics of the site. The site looks like a real start-up website, and I immediately classify it as "something I should look into" rather than "spam", "boring", etc. So, that's good.

I didn't like the "feed" of searches that is the primary focus of the page. Since your summary didn't adequately explain to me what your service does (well, technically it did, but I just didn't "get" it), this stream of searches was rather confusing. They were all from several hours ago, by people who I'm not the least bit interested in, had no comments, and everytime I would think about clicking on anything it would abruptly move as the next equally annoying search thing faded in. Also, it's buggy as hell. It looks somewhat nice, but doesn't show off anything of value. Rather, it makes your site look like a ghost town. Sign up for a ghost town? No thanks.

I would suggest to populate your site with some interesting content (even if you have to fake making users to do it), and show me the most interesting discussions. That would get me interested: "Wow! People are actually discussing stuff that others are searching for!" Rather than "Uh, a stream of mundane searches? All several hours old, in no apparent order, with no comments... what's the point of this?"

Another thing I noticed is that I kept wanting to scroll up, thinking that the color horizontal bar was cut off content. While this was just a minor annoyance, it was still annoying. I also felt lost, and somewhat betrayed, when what looked like the major navigation of the site was actually adwords.

Now, let's talk about the idea. I don't feel like you're creating something that people want. I'm not the world's best Googler, but 99% of the time I manage to find what I'm looking for. The other 1%, I'll try on other search engines, or ask people on FB, whatever. I also use http://www.moreofit.com (shameless plug) to search for things if I already have one good example of what I'm looking for. So, your site is not likely to help me find things.

Now, are my search queries something I want as a point of conversation? Generally, no. I could only imagine this being useful in some sort of SEO forum where I'm interested in the rankings of the results... in which case I'd just create a new thread in that forum.

I'm not convinced at all that "search queries" are a topic people want to talk about. Even if it were the world's most amazing point of conversation, why would I use your site to discuss my search queries rather than the thousands of other already-established and populated commenting systems online? Why not just post a status update on facebook, or twitter, or post on a forum I frequent, or Reddit, HN, etc?

I just think to myself... of all the things that one would want to talk about online, is "search query" really at all popular? And, if so, what technological benefit does your site have that makes me want to talk about "search queries" at your site, rather than on any other of 1000 forums? It's such an absurd concept that in retrospect it's the reason why I didn't "get" what your site did.

If you could show off some examples of interesting discussions centered around search queries and put them on the frontpage, I might have a completely different opinion, and maybe a "search query enthusiast" niche could be cultivated.

Firstly, county should be country :). I like the idea, it's pretty nifty and I can see it being useful, but I think your approach is wrong. When I go to search for something, I just type it into my address bar and search, I never go to google.com and then search for something, I haven't done that in about three years :), so as you can probably tell, I don't really want to go through seekier.com every time I want to search for something.

So here's how I would approach it. Why not make a browser extension that does everything in the background, this way, I can use the service without having to run over to the site every time I want to look for something, I'd probably forget about doing it altogether after an hour :). If you decide to take this approach though, make sure you put a big button somewhere that allows you to to turn the service off if you decide you want to go and look for porn or something ;).

Keep up the great work guys! Don't get discouraged if anybody tells you that it's the most useless thing in the world, people said the exact same thing about twitter, until they began using it and realized it's benefits.

I'd suggest you skip the Google Adsense for now; you could always reconsider later. My first impression was "they want me to click on an ad" - that's their model. And yes, to echo angumagu, I'd recommend a modification to the thumbnail too. Good luck!