Subscribe
Sign in
Ninfex — Experimental people-powered search engine
Ninfex is an experimental people-powered search engine without a complex algorithm or crawler. Users can submit and vote on links. URLs may optionally link to discussions about them at popular forums like reddit, hackernews, lobsters etc.
13
Replies
Lihay Gersht
I love it and I think your statement that users rely on communities as proxy for search is beautiful - I think it's not only relevant for power users. It will be super cool to let communities or teams build their own search index on top of it - to make it more focused on a certain topic and prioritize people you consider more credible. Good luck!
Share
I'm concerned about that logo. You're going to get sued out of existence. :/
It's even got Netflix's signature curved bottom. You might need to consider rebranding before anyone from Netflix notices... ?makers @teamninfex
@sarang_sheth :) Now that I look at it after reading your comment it does look somewhat similar. In any case I wouldn't worry too much, this logo was made just for PH.
@rolodexter Thanks for that. It inspired me to add a line above the search results which asks people to add a URL to the index if they are unhappy with what they see.
This is really cool! I love how you combined the power of SERPs with UGC & Community Voting Features. If it could live ontop of Google AS IS, I think with time it could be an absolutely amazing way of A/B Testing search queries without having to go 10-15 pages deep. People voting on links vs. googles algorithm to determine page rank is really interesting! Keep this project going! What's your Twitter?
@julianpaul Thanks for the feedback. I couldn't have said it better myself. Especially about how it could live ontop of Google AS IS.
Twitter -> https://twitter.com/teamninfex
I’m the creator of Ninfex.
I’ve been unhappy with the inconsistent quality of web search results for quite some time now. Wanting to do something about this for myself, I started experimenting with the way I save my notes/bookmarks.
In all of my trials, two things seemed to work more than all others and proved to be useful in the long term. One: saving my good search result URLs. Two: saving links to discussions on those URLs from Reddit, HN, Lobsters, etc. because in my opinion, community feedback is a (relatively) better proxy for URL quality.
This combined with the Apple notes search feature became a very simple but effective personal index. For the main topics that interest me, I often found myself searching my index before searching the web. Once this setup started working well for me, I thought it was probably time to add a feature which lets users vote on URLs and host a version of this online, so others can both contribute to and benefit from it.
With that in mind, I started speaking to more people who were unhappy with the current state of search. Turns out the most common workaround people use is restricting results to communities (mostly reddit) either by just appending the name or using site: operator (example - bone conduction headphones reddit).
This was further confirmation that the so-called "power users" had already moved on to relying on using communities as a proxy for their search results.
And so I built a basic version of Ninfex with all those features: community-curated index, votable urls, forum links and search. It’s an early stage prototype and I’m slowly populating the index with URLs from my personal wiki.
I look forward to your feedback and I’m open to all kinds of suggestions.
