Ask HN: What do you think about my search engine?

4 points

13 years ago

Tomorrowbook is a web search engine that displays results as an infinite list of favicons by default. However, the admin and domain owner have the ability to upload custom images/logos for domains and/or sub-pages "results".

Examples of search results for "Obama" and "News":

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6jnvIhOPJO7aWVNMDUwX3pGeGM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6jnvIhOPJO7cTk2N0NHWmtpUzQ/edit?usp=sharing

The goal was to offer a more visual display of results for children, elderly and mobile devices. Originally it used the Google API, but the number of queries on the first day catapulted it into the pay category - so it was rewritten using the Bing API which at that time was free with unlimited queries (at least I never saw query limit at that time - I do not know about now).

I have written about tomorrowbook in HN comments with somewhat favorable responses, so I am posting about it, because even though it folded after a year, with HN's insight I can still learn and grow from the experience. Maybe even get some motivation. I learned a lot already, for example my logo was just a bad idea period; after seeing The Social Network I thought when I got 220,000 queries on the 4th day after launching I would get someones attention - I did not; and I will not even mention the disaster of a press release.

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