Search Engine Project

[bencoe]

Hey, I've been working on a Diggish search engine as the culmination
of a bunch of work I was doing over the university semester. It's a
combination of a web-crawling indexer, with voting like Digg. Any
ways, I thought I might be able to talk a few people into submitting
their sites to it - and maybe trying it out if anyone has the time
(and I ask real nicely).

It's here:

http://www.plink-search.com

Thanks,

Ben.

 

[Brian Cryer]

Hey, I've been working on a Diggish search engine as the culmination
of a bunch of work I was doing over the university semester. It's a
combination of a web-crawling indexer, with voting like Digg. Any
ways, I thought I might be able to talk a few people into submitting
their sites to it - and maybe trying it out if anyone has the time
(and I ask real nicely).

Some observations:

1. I think its against google's adsense ts&cs to display ads on a page with
search results (but their conditions may have changed since I last looked).

2. Search results didn't seem at all relevant for the search I did, but this
is excusable if you've not crawled many pages.

3. How do you submit sites? All I could see were options to login or
register. I don't mind submitting sites to a search engine, or using a
voting facility, but I don't want to have to log in to do either.

 

[bencoe]

Hey Brian.

I just read through Google's terms of use, and couldn't find something
that explicitly indicated that, I guess I'll just wait and see if
Google harasses me.

Yah. I'm still working on getting more sites crawled, also, results
will hopefully get more relevant as people vote.

Unfortunately, signing up is necessary to vote and suggest sites, I
think this is necessary for two main reasons:
1) It stops tons of spam sites from being suggested, since the people
who suggest sites have taken the time to sign-up.
2) Secondly, I need to make sure that the same person doesn't vote for
the same web-site many times in a row (for instance their own web-
site), an account is the best way to prevent this.

On a positive note, I've just gotten my Blogging engine (from a
previous years project), up and running, so as a fringe benefit of
signing up you also now get your own blog, which uses a unique - and I
think nifty - editing system. I'm going to index these Blogs on a
regular basis as well, and hopefully they'll constitute a significant
portion of the search results.

Ben.

 

[Brian Cryer]

Hey Brian.

I just read through Google's terms of use, and couldn't find something
that explicitly indicated that, I guess I'll just wait and see if
Google harasses me.

Just checked. I think your right (& safe).

Yah. I'm still working on getting more sites crawled, also, results
will hopefully get more relevant as people vote.

Unfortunately, signing up is necessary to vote and suggest sites, I
think this is necessary for two main reasons:
1) It stops tons of spam sites from being suggested, since the people
who suggest sites have taken the time to sign-up.
2) Secondly, I need to make sure that the same person doesn't vote for
the same web-site many times in a row (for instance their own web-
site), an account is the best way to prevent this.

On a positive note, I've just gotten my Blogging engine (from a
previous years project), up and running, so as a fringe benefit of
signing up you also now get your own blog, which uses a unique - and I
think nifty - editing system. I'm going to index these Blogs on a
regular basis as well, and hopefully they'll constitute a significant
portion of the search results.

Best of luck with it.

Out of interest, and I'll understand if this is sensitive, but how many hits
do you currently get a day?

 

[bencoe]

I'm currently not getting too many, hopefully this will change... once
I start trying to advertise it a bit...

From the couple posts I threw up I believe I've had 3 or 4 people sign

up for an account (not too spectacular).

Hopefully there are a few like minded sites I can list PLink on or
something... As with any site like this it gets better the more people
who are using it, it's kind of frustrating trying to hit that critical
mass

Thanks for your interest,

Ben.

 

[bencoe]

Hey, just to keep people posted, I'm still looking for testers for
PLink. I've added several features based on input so far.

- When signing up an individual now gets a confirmation e-mail which
they must respond to.
- To cut down on clutter I now attempt to group together similar
search results.
- I've added a Blogging and C.V. creation tool, which is built out of
a previous university project... If you've signed up for an account
just click on Edit My C.V., to get started. This tool is neat, and
gives me something to index on a regular basis other than just
external sites... (The tool allows you to export your C.V. as a .PDF
so it's actually fairly useful.)
- I've indexed several thousand more sites, and refined the algorithms
somewhat (having found an error with one).

Ben.