Super Simple Search

Finally, great search for any website

2 followers

Finally, great search for any website

2 followers

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The easiest way to add search to any website. >Special launch day offer now live on our site!<

Launch tags:User Experience•Marketing•SaaS

Launch Team

LoomHit record, hand off to AI

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From your introduction /FAQ Why are you doing this? We found outselves (???) often going back to Google to find information on websites, even when we're already on the website. This is bad both in terms of user experience as well as for website owners, and it gives even more power to Google. ..... How does super simple search generate the search results? We use search results from Microsoft Bing. The advantage is that many websites are already indexed by Bing, so we can get started immediately. We might switch to our own search engine in the future. .... ?makers So are you not providing more power to Microsoft instead of Google? As far as I understand that Microsoft Bing is just a competitor of Google Search using exactly same business model. Further, enabling site search is NOT a simple thing and it is costly too like Swiftype using Elastic Search ($79/mo). I would recommend if you want to create a real product in this domain, try implementing Apache Solr backend with an easy frontend for site-owners to implement it.

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6yr ago

traveldays

Maker

@ghosh_ Hi there, thanks for taking the time to type this out. There's a lot to unpack here, so I'm going to focus on two of your main points, the "power to Google" part and why we're using Bing. 1. What do we mean by giving power to Google? The moment visitors go to Google to search your site, you give Google the power to shape the user's journey on the web by showing ads and collecting user data. There is already a strong tendency by Google to try to keep users on their site, e.g. with AMP or their featured snippet and quick answers. So there might be a day when your journey on the web will be completely dominated by Google, even more so than it is today. Nobody wants that. So 3s is playing a role in counteracting this tendency by Google, and for that it's not really important what we use as a back-end, as long as it's not Google. Which brings us to #2 2. Why are we using Bing? As you said, there are multiple solutions for building your own search engine and not rely on a third party. The thing is, they are simply not as good. Our goal is to give relevant and smart search results, and Bing does just that. Take as an example the demo of the Mauritius Tourism Information page, that I posted above. Entering "when to go" gives you "Best time to visit Mauritius" as the first result, which is probably exactly what you're looking for with this query. It means that it understood that "when" relates to time and "go" is a synonym for "visit". Without getting too technical, that's something that is simply not within the scope of the default ranking functions like TF-IDF or BM25 that Elasticsearch or Solr use. It certainly is possible, but it requires a lot of engineering to have it work consistently across all possible domains. With Bing we have a solution that works well and reliably, so we can deliver great search results to our users consistently. As mentioned in our FAQs, we might switch to our own solution, once we're happy with the performance. But until then, it's going to be Bing. Hope that answers your questions, feel free to contact us at hi@getsupersimplesearch.com if you'd like to know more.

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6yr ago

@getsupersimplesearch @yunus_abd Thanks for the long reply .. But ... 1. If you really care about the corporate entities' dominance over users' data, you should have rejected both Google and Microsoft, and opted for something like DuckDuckGo. 2. "Relevant and smart" is an extremely vague term. While Bing or probably much superior Google may generate the query-maps conveniently, the entire dependency on 3rd party proprietary algorithms also leads to include their biases and business models. (Further as users are forced to 3rd party privacy policy and terms, they are not 'your users'. They are actually Bing's users.)

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6yr ago

traveldays

Maker

@getsupersimplesearch @ghosh_ No problem. To address your other points: 1. We looked into using DuckDuckGo, but they don't offer a search API, so unfortunately that's a nonstarter. Long-term we're probably going to move away from Bing, as I wrote before, but for the moment I think it's a good solution. A lot of other great projects, e.g. Ecosia, rely on Bing too. 2. For an example of 'relevant and smart', see my previous post. Also I'd like to point out that Bing doesn't actually get any of our user's data, the only thing they ever see is the search query itself, which goes through our servers. Hope that answers your questions?

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6yr ago

For me it works pretty well, and can really make search easy, and keep the users on a website. Good job guys!

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6yr ago

traveldays

Maker

@zsuzsanna_seredi_szabo Thanks for the kind words Zsuzsanna, much appreciated! 🥰

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6yr ago

traveldays

Maker

Hey Hunters, thanks for checking us out! 🎉🎉 It's 2020, but many websites are still a nightmare to navigate and find information on. That's why we want to make it super simple to add an elegant, minimalist search widget to any website. Our particular goals are: 👉 Make it super simple to use 👉 Make it super simple for website owners to implement We're constantly improving super simple search (or as we lovingly call it, "3s"), so we'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions! On our website you can create previews, to see how 3s will look on different websites. Here are some that we tried: Wikipedia: https://api.getsupersimplesearch... The Guardian: https://api.getsupersimplesearch... Mauritius Tourism Information: https://api.getsupersimplesearch... Join us and spread the word, to make the web more beautiful and easier to navigate! 🔥

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6yr ago

Super Simple Search

Maker

I figure this would be a good place to ask. Which feature should we ship next?

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6yr ago22 Answers

Axolo

Congrats on the PH launch ! Curious to see the applications

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6yr ago

traveldays

Maker

@chnsydney Thanks Sydney! Surprisingly there are still many websites that treat search as an afterthought, or don't have search at all. We'd like to change that 🔥

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6yr ago