HN Explorer

My gift to HN, a tool to check who else had your idea

9 points by gtardini ↗ HN
Between HNers there are many creative persons, guys who come up with a billion different ideas every week. Definitely i'm this kind of person and even if not every idea is good, every idea deserves at least some research. Since i got tired of googling general descriptions of the disruptive startup idea which just occurred to my mind i coded together this small but for me very useful tool which does this job for you. You just briefly describe your idea and it gives you as a result the startups which correspond (or are most similar) to your very idea. It's made of google custom search api plus some processing in order to weigh the results. You can find it at http://gtardini.com/wwwhoelse , don't mind the design which really sucks. I find it quite useful, hope it will be the same for you. Feedback is appreciated!

15 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] thread
bowmande
Very useful tool. It is helpful to see what is out there for the idea you are pursuing. Thanks!
RiderOfGiraffes
Clickable: http://gtardini.com/wwwhoelse

Lovely idea, but ...

Color me suspicious, but this could simply be a way of harvesting potential ideas for exploitation by the site owner.

How can you convince people otherwise?

(I'm in a nasty mood today - I've been dealing with threat-mode analyses ...)

matdwyer
I'm assuming that your idea has to be pretty darn good for someone to be able to take a 1 sentence description and turn it into a business better than you
gtardini
thanks for the clickable link, you're right about the colors i definitely have to change them. I'll also add a small disclaimer to reassure people that i don't save anything submitted in the search input
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bhavin
very useful tool, thanks for this!

One suggestion: It would be great if you could improve color scheme overall.. espcially on the result page, its difficult to read with dark grey bg and blue fonts.

matdwyer
Agreed - please change the blue, its very hard to see
knowtheory
Being first mover into a market is no guarantee of success. Likewise, and more importantly, not being first in your market is not the primary critical factor in successfully pursuing an idea.

Rio built flash based mp3 back in the late 90's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300 ). What's the default brand name for mp3 players now? Definitely not Rio's!

gtardini
Yes sure, and in fact this tool is just to check the competition in order to see how your idea has been differently developed by others and take inspiration.
wmblaettler
From the Google Custom Search API: { "error": { "errors": [ { "domain": "usageLimits", "reason": "dailyLimitExceeded", "message": "Daily Limit Exceeded" } ], "code": 403, "message": "Daily Limit Exceeded" } }
gtardini
very bad :( asked google to raise the app daily quota
agnesberthelot
Very good idea. I won't worry too much about idea harvesting ... idea alone won't succeed, it has to be coupled with excellent execution. However, even when I typed in your suggestion "sell stuff online", no results were given. Perhaps you might want to check into that.
rcavezza
Error?

Warning: file_get_contents(https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=AIzaSyAsvDUMt...) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden in /home/gtardini/public_html/wwwhoelse/index.php on line 69 no web apps found matching your idea. Maybe you have been really original but just in case try to perform another search describing your creation with different words.

gtardini
awww, exceeded the api call limit, will fix that later. i ll also change the colors, thanks for all the suggestions!
gtardini
i fixed the error message and asked google to raise my daily api quota, tomorrow i'll see