Hello and thanks for visiting this thread! I am interested in your opinion about my web site, http://www.uppersites.com It's a search engine I designed about three months ago. Though it's PR4 on Google, the pages disappeared from the Google index for some reason. I got a few offers to purchase the site, including the three servers, source codes, databases etc. I am looking for suggestions on improving the site, its ranking algo and perhaps evaluation as well. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Kris
Nice! Although the graphics could be improved...maybe web 2.0 style. Are you using your own crawling bot, or getting data off somewhere else? Don't like the extreme tracking icon at the bottom - I'm sure you can get stats somewhere else. Apart from that it's alright. 5.5/10
It's really clean and fresh looking which is welcomed. A blurb describing why this search engine is different would have been helpful for me. Good Site!
Thanks for the comments and the rating Geoffrey! I'm using my own crawler I designed. Users can submit their URLs for free which then my crawler visits, indexes if the content is sufficient and follows the links from the submitted pages as well. I'll remove the tracking icon and try to improve on the logo. Thanks again!
Thanks gettalink! This search engine is different from the major search engines, because my crawler is more forgiving than the big players' bot. Since the ranking algo I designed is using a different technique, newer and smaller websites with honest content could have a chance at getting ranked high and receive some traffic from my search engine.
Thanks for checking out my little search engine! Unfortunately, this site is still new, but before the Big Daddy Update my other search engines used to get over 20,000 daily unique... Now they all redirect to this new one using 301 so I'm expecting some traffic in the very near future.
amazingly simple, yet so effective! The easiest website submission form i've seen around (other than automated ones ). I do have one complaint though, i clicked "See your site here..." under the sponsored links section, but it doesn't work (or atleast i can't make it work) it takes me to "pay-per-click.html". Anyways, nice search engine. Keep up the good work!
Looks good, simple clean and nice. That is what search engine is about. Just like how google got started.
I like it, it's very fast. I would also like to learn how to make my own crawler. I would rev up the design a little though.
This is how my search spider works: The crawler visits the URLs submitted via the form on the Free Add URL page. If the visited page has enough quality content on it then it will be included in the search engine index which later will be used for searching with the user's query. While visiting a page, the crawler saves most links to other pages on the site and to pages on other sites and visits them later. To get high ranking on UpperSites a page must have relevant content to the text in the title. The ranking algorithm also uses anchor text from incoming links to determine the popularity of the indexed page.
Thanks neverstudy! What would you suggest me to change on it to make it better? I'm already working on the ranking algo to sort pages more effectively, but I'm not sure how to make it look better. Any thoughts?
Hey, Your welcome. Well, there are many ways you can go around with the style of the site. As you know, Web 2.0 is becoming the next gen. style for online web sites. If would be very nice to have that done. Also, your site is all the way at the TOP, if you know what I mean. It is not in the middle, for example how google and such have their search field located. Another thing, is your site really trademarked? If not, I suggest you do so, you are likely to go far with this. Although it is only a search engine, think about adding more services as a backup, because basically you are reinventing the wheel, unless you are doing it in a different manner. If you want a Web 2.0 logo, you can create one with PS or get someone to make it. If you want a generated one, go here. Your privacy policy seems like its framed (where you have to scroll to read it all), you don't need it to be framed you can just have it on the site page. The site map... I don't get it. It more like Keywords Page. Instead of top 30 searches, it would be nice to see a list of top 10 searches right next to the search field once you have centered it, or right below it. But its a very nice approach. I hope my review helps you be very successful. Cheers, neverstudy
Thanks again for all your comments neverstudy! Wow! So many things to think about... I checked out the logo generator site you sent me. I don't know which font to pick. This shows that I'm a programmer/SEO, not a web designer. Yes, the site map is a list of keywords, simply because all the pages are nothing but SERPs optimized for those keywords. That is how I get the major search engines notice my site. At the same time it could the reason why sometimes the number of pages indexed in the top search engines fluctuates so much. So I might just get rid of it and do a proper site map. The top ten most searched keywords sound much better than the top 30 or 20 or anything else, so I will just show the Top 10 then. Thanks again for your thoughts. I will start working on the changes, though it will take me a while to remodel the site.
i dont like it at all: make it clean search box, no ads - nothing. the green color is just no good.. light blue and light yellow might do the job. remove the Today's Top 30 Searches: and place it on seperate page. re-design the logo with some REAL logo and not just words. and finally center it. P.S - is it really TM?
You should definitely keep it simple. I don't like the search results font size (website names). It's too big. It makes it all look to spammy. And tell the world that this is a real searchengine.