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I made a 'search engine' for fun (foobub.com)

127 points by vu0tran ↗ HN
This was a weekend project for fun. The problem I had was I felt like existing search engines were too cluttered and I couldn't easily sort results by websites.

I experimented and rather than returning so many results, it returns the results from a few number of websites and tries to rank in on a confidence level from that smaller subset.

71 comments

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vu0tran
The website isn't meant to be used for any real utility. What I wanted to demonstrate was just an alternate way to look at search.

I think we've just gotten so used to Google and its millions of results; I wondered, what would happen if I took that all away and presented only just a small handful of results?

tomasien
That's kind of exactly what I saw, and despite the lack of utility, I was like "Oh! This is nice!"
DividesByZero
Sometimes minimal is best. Then again, Google does have the 'I'm feeling lucky' button - maybe that ought to just display a few results for them?

Either way, nice experiment!

dave5104
The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button doesn't actually work anymore. :(
bencevans
Yep however now you type what you want, it works some ajax magic, press tab to activate the keyboard shortcuts then hit enter which takes you to the first result.

I use it without thinking about it now and I don't need to touch the mouse bearing in mind I'm on the keyboard typing the search.

hkmurakami
This actually seems quite nice for a slightly extended dictionary :).
Jarihd
Are you using search results from other search engines and applying some heuristics on that or have you mined your own web data. nice start though !!!
[dead] hfs
Except usually Google's top results are exactly what I'm looking for. It's when they're not that those millions of results come in handy - otherwise there are tons of things I'd never find.
jere
Neat. So it just searches wikipedia?

If so, I can't really complain. 95% of my searches are followed by "wiki" normally so I can get wikipedia first.

vu0tran
Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.

Try putting in a coding question and Stackoverflow will show: http://foobub.com/?s=python+xrange+vs+range

If you put in a random question, yahoo answers will probably appear: http://foobub.com/?s=why+does+sweat+smell+so+bad

Wikipedia just generally comes up first as the way it's weighted. It answers and provides knowledge for most queries.

whalabi
I searched for "ruby on rails" and it got me wiki and quora, but not stackoverflow, which I would expect. See: http://foobub.com/?s=ruby+on+rails

Also, searching for "stackoverflow" gives unexpected results: http://foobub.com/?s=stackoverflow

Otherwise, surprisingly useful for something so simple. If you could tone down/up result sources and it had more (e.g. show me nothing from yahoo answers, more from stackoverflow), i would concievably use this instead of the goog for most things.

Like many people most of my googles are "wiki blah"

Good job!

Katelyn
I thought I was the only one who does this. There should be an easier way..
uiri
I made something similar to foobub which takes you to wikipedia on exact title matches: http://s.xqz.ca/ I use it primarily from my URL bar.
gabemart
In chrome, go to settings > manage search engines. Add a new engine with the parameters:

   name:wiki
   keyword: w
   URL: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=inurl:en.wikipedia %s&btnI=745
Once saved, in chrome's address bar type "w foo" and press enter and you'll go directly to the wikipedia article on foo

By routing through google, it's also much more tolerant of misspellings.

zanny
You can do the same in Firefox by going to wikipedia, right clicking the search bar, "add a keyword", make the keyword w, and save it as a bookmark.

That way you don't need to search through google, you can search directly. Works with most search boxes.

pirateking
I used to append "wiki" to >90% of my searches as well. Finally got in the habit of using DuckDuckGo bang syntax now.

  w! <query>
bad_user
Chrome and Firefox can do this too and it's easy so I don't get the reliance on DuckDuckGo for it.

In Firefox you go to the wikipedia page, right click on the search text box, then "Add Keyword for this Search". In Chrome, you do the same thing, right click on that search box and then click "Add as Search Engine".

You can add whatever keyword you want, like "w" and from then on, all searches with "w " as a prefix will go straight to Wikipedia's results.

I have shortcuts defined for Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Amazon.com, IMDB, a dictionary for my native language, my personal Gmail, my work Gmail, Google Translate and Hacker News.

For instance for Hacker News, I often want to search for articles I've read here, not to mention it's a valuable resource for getting other people's opinions on certain subjects. So instead of searching on Google for:

     some topic site:news.ycombinator.com
I defined a prefix for this search "hn", and so I simply type "hn some topic". You can't use the shortcut for this though, you'll have to go to Settings and manually add a search engine setting.

For Google Translate, I basically type "enro phrase", for translating "phrase" from English to Romanian, while I type "roen phrase" for translating "phrase" from Romanian to English.

Can DuckDuckGo do that?

mochizuki
It keeps telling me an apostrophe is the number 39. No, but seriously it looks neat. What are the websites it queries for results? I've seen Yahoo! and Wikipedia so far.
vu0tran
I replied to this above. Just:

'Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Answers (lawl), Quora, Stackoverflow.'

Stackoverflow comes up when you do coding questions, yahoo answers when you do just random questions. Although, Quora doesn't appear as often as I like. I need to do a bit of tweaking.

Here's an example where Quora comes up: http://foobub.com/?s=vu0tran

codezero
Pretty cool, I actually searched for Quora as one of the first queries and was surprised it showed up, now I see why!

I'm impressed with the results for most (obviously not esoteric) searches.

One thing: lots of URLs don't wrap or truncate, so you get some overflow, example: http://foobub.com/?s=how+is+babby+form

pbhjpbhj
&#39 gives ' (ie it's the ASCII in hex of apostrophe)
clone1018
Add <!doctype html> and do <input id='search' name='s' placeholder='Type then hit enter' type='text' autofocus>
vu0tran
Thanks for the suggestion. It's in!
clone1018
No, thank you! Much more usable now, there's also a couple other markup changes that need to be done, planning on open sourcing this?
vu0tran
Yeah. After I 'unshitify' a bit of it.
drhayes9
Try open sourcing it before it gets unshitty.

I'm trying it myself, just putting things out there and saying "to hell with it" because, ultimately, unshitifying things is Zeno's paradox kind of work; you're never really done. And, really, it's probably better than you think anyway.

clone1018
The urge to move his <script> tags from under the <html> tags is killing me D:
vog
Vu0tran, as you can see, others would be more than happy to help you with "unshitifying".
vog
Which of Zeno's paradoxes are you alluding to? I can't find any that fits the analogy. (i.e. never-ending work due to perfectionism)
GeneralMayhem
I think he's referring to the discrete-motion paradox - that you can never reach the other side of the room because you must first go halfway, and before that you must first go 1/4 of the way, and before that...

It's not the greatest analogy in the world, but it sort of works in that it illustrates the fractal-like nature of bug-squashing.

blefloch
When the search term is one character long (e.g., a single quote, or an ampersand, or whatever), it would be nice to get the corresponding Wikipedia page if it exists. It's pretty much impossible to google for special chars.
ctdonath
Searching for "foobub" on foobub.com gives http://www.google.com/search?q=foobub - clarification please?
clone1018
if(input != found in index) redirect( google search )
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vu0tran
My site does not SEO well.

If it's really confident about a result, it'll only give 1 or 2 results. i.e. http://foobub.com/?s=cats

If it's kinda confused, it gives multiple results and ranks the site by most likely: http://foobub.com/?s=what%20is%20the%20answer%20to%20life%20...

If it has no what you're doing, it'll search it on Google for you: http://foobub.com/?s=foobub

My website is not yet self-aware. No need to worry, guys.

jaredsohn
It is unfortunate that doing so takes you away from the site (I imagine the basic use case right now is to type in a bunch of queries to see what it displays.)

Ideally, it would show Google search results in an iframe, although I imagine that is against their TOS. Maybe just linking to Google search results would be a better experience.

eru
Or you can use a similar deal to what duckduckgo does.
nickmolnar2
Are you crawling these sites yourself, or using the Bing API to get the index?
vu0tran
I'll get into more detail with a blog post tomorrow, but I just used Yahoo/Bing. It was a 3 hr project, figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel :)
jrussbowman
iI felt the sameway . I just used various apis for unscatter.com you may want to see about getting access to the blekko api if you keep playing with it. iI use some of the slash tags they offer for some search views, it's real easy to work with.
photorized
Are they charging you for requests (over the initial allotment of 5,000 requests per month), if this is done via Bing Web Search API in the Azure Marketplace?
znt
Is there a way to exclude websites from results? Such as Quora?
orangethirty
Well done. I like how answers are given as tiles. Its a good experiment to try with nuuton. I do not like, however, that you did not serve too much from the classic search UI/UX. Shoot me an email: my username [at] nuuton [dot] com
kami8845
Hey, what does the backend look like?
vu0tran
Hi, since there seems to be a lot of interest, I figured I could answer all of them at once in a blog post which I'll post sometime tomorrow.

To answer your question though, the backend is running on Python. There's no particular reason. I just find it a lot easier to script with. It's running on fCGI with nginx on the backend server. On the front is PHP... which is served through up by apache. I find it easier for me to do $_GET, hack around forms really fast and also just echo Javascript everywhere.

jbranchaud
I'm confused, if this is a search engine, where are all the ads?
mehulkar
haven't hired the mbas yet :P
s_m
You might want to sanitize the placeholder attribute on the results page - in its current state, it is susceptible to XSS.
nsxwolf
This just redirected my search to Google. Edit: I see, it's a feature not a bug. My search results weren't found by foobub.
hnriot
you made a search engine client, it's very different. A search engine is an index atop a corpus of content that you crawl.

It might be useful for you to look at jQuery Masony library for your presentation.

vu0tran
Yeah, I knew I must have been missing something. That's why I put "search engine" in quotes. :)
jusuchin
Youch... inline styling and javascript outside of the closing </html> tag..
hackerlass
Neat, would like to see the code. If you're crawling sites yourself, that would be really interesting. Nice work.
mintplant
Huh. This is actually rather good for programming searches; surfaced some useful things I hadn't seen before. Bookmarked. Thanks!
pgrote
Odd. The auto complete in Chrome shows me the WordPress extensions I have installed on my sites.
state
It's nice to think of a search engine as something that can actually be tuned to a desired output. Nice to see. You're absolutely right that we have come to think of this problem as solved, and it isn't.
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chuppo
You hijacked my middle-click to open in same tab instead of another one. Gah!

Otherwise, very good work. I was suprised it can even do simple sentence-search.

How did you make this, what is the backend?

nedwin
I thought this was going to be a search engine for things that are fun.
indiecore
That'd be interesting. Maybe scrape twitter/facebook/etc for stuff correlated with "fun" and related words?
Ramario
The simplicity of this makes it enjoyable. Great work!
havemurci
I did something a little bit similar when I made www.eaisy.com. I like a minimal interface.
sjmulder
That’s really nice. My only gripe is that I find the definition font really hard to read.