I have been building this search engine http://www.vmgo.com/ for over a year and really need some more ideas from webmasters. I have been studying google and the various other engines for about 8 years and about 2 years ago I decided to build my own. I've been working on it off and on till now and I think it's ready to go live and compete with the other major engines. When I go live with it, I will put it on a cluster of servers which will speed it up alot. I built the engine with the users and webmasters in mind keeping it as simple as possible so that inexperienced users and webmasters could use it easily without getting confused. (I remember when I was new to the web). The engine ranks pages by votes and clicks etc... so that the most visited listings move to the top of the SERP's. Each link has a spam link so spam can be easily and instantly deleted from the results. All spam reports are reviewed and pages that are not spam will be added back into the results and will not be able to be reported again. All new pages submitted will get an extra boost in the rankings but if the new pages are junk they will eventually get reported as spam or demoted. I have thought about the abuse issues that people could just vote their links to the top of the results which is true but if it is spam then that is where I want it because then it will get reported as spam which will ban it from ranking for that keyword ever again. If it get's too crazy, I will simply put a limit on the amount of times a link can get a vote from the same IP and then ban the link. I really would love some feedback good and bad. Scott
Oh yeah, I forgot to mension that we may also allow people to use our results in their own search engines for free. So our results may be used all over the net by anyone. We may have to limit it to smaller lower traffic sites (under 1000 searches a day?) but I think that would be a great thing for the smaller sites. Of course that is in the future a ways off but it is something we are working on. Also I am working on an article submission system where you can submit an article for a keyword like "solar panels" and write a short article about solar panels and how they work with links to your pages or references to other websites etc... The article will be listed on the first page of results for the keyword you submitted it to. We're only going to allow one article per keyword/phrase so you will have to get in fast to get the good keywords but there are millions of keyphrases. When we were testing on our old server, we had over 1 million keywords in our database! There is a catch though. We will require a link to VMGO.com from your home page. We don't want links to raise our PR or anything like that, nor do we care about PR, we simply want to build traffic to the engine and the best way is to get links. Once you add a link to VMGO.com and submit your article, it will always be on that SERPs for the keyword you submitted to unless you take the link off your home page. The links will begin to send traffic to VMGO.com and alot of people will begin searching and your article will always be generating traffic for your sites. So what do you think about the article submission? Is it something you would do?
It is slow for the first initial search for a keyword because it is building the databases for the keyword you searched for the first time. If you search for the same keyword again, it will be alot faster because the database is built. So it's only slow the first time you search for a keyword that has never been searched for before.
Firstly the results arent that great (you either need to index more sites in the database or get the results from somewhere else i.e Google and let them be manipulated by peoples voting) as well as the fact that the design is poor too. The spam and positive/negative images also aren't that nice to be honest, which i recommend that you should improve on along with the design and the results. Also the fact that there are scripts on the marketplace that are similiar to this, so you need to make yourself different by adding an extra USP due to the fact that there is a social-powered search engine on the market as well as other search engines creating one.
Of course the results aren't that great, I got them from MSN. HAHAHA! But over time the results will become better because of the voting etc... As for the design, I just threw up some quick images to make it useable. I will work on the design once I work out all the bugs because I don't want to get a mass of traffic to the site while there are so many bugs. I have found more bugs in the scripts in the last week than I have in the last year because of all your searches! I really appreciate your help! I guess I will get to work on the design sinse it seems to be a big issue with everyone. I guess looks count for 99% of a website. HAHAHA!
Ok, I redesigned the site. How do you like the new design? I haven't done the entire site, just the home page and results pages. I did a test on the article submission scripts and you can see an example if you search for the keyword gifts. On the right hand column you can see an article on the keyword gifts I copied from wikipedia.
Wayzee, Can you elaborate on that a little? The speed seems good to me. I am on a dialup 28k connection and a search takes only 4-5 seconds which is the same as it takes when I search on google. I tried it on a DSL connection tonight and it seemed lightening fast to me. like 1 second or less.
I added related videos to the results and added tags to the page listings. Let me know if it's helpful. http://www.vmgo.com/
It's system seems great and it has a lot of potential. However, I agree that a design makeover would be a good touch. With Web 2.0, sites are pretty much expected to look sleek.
I don't like how it second guesses my queries... If I use a -, I intend for it to be important in the search. If I encase my search in ""s, I intend to search for that specific term. The site itself is.. OK, but a little bland for the moment. I imagine that'll change over time as you try to grow it.