Hacker News is my favourite site on the internet and having been a member for almost 4 years I've learnt a lot from everyone here. My co-founders and I couldn't think of a better place to launch our new site and get valuable feedback from a group of people we respect.<p>48ers allows realtime searching of a number of social networks - we created the site to scratch our own itch - to track what people are saying about other websites we own. We hope it might be useful for brands too.<p>Feel free to give it a go at <a href="http://www.48ers.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.48ers.com</a> or jump straight into a search:<p><a href="http://48ers.com/search/?q=hacker+news" rel="nofollow">http://48ers.com/search/?q=hacker+news</a><p><a href="http://48ers.com/search/?q=airbnb" rel="nofollow">http://48ers.com/search/?q=airbnb</a><p><a href="http://48ers.com/search/?q=balsamiq" rel="nofollow">http://48ers.com/search/?q=balsamiq</a><p><a href="http://48ers.com/search/?q=mark+zuckerberg" rel="nofollow">http://48ers.com/search/?q=mark+zuckerberg</a><p>Please comment here and tell us about:<p>* What you like<p>* What you dislike<p>* Any bugs you find<p>* Where you'd like to see this go in future (we have some ideas but would love to hear yours)
I'm working on something similar with www.unscatter.com, though you and I are taking different approaches on clutter vs providing more context.<p>Likes:
- Layout and design. I wish I had a better knack for that kind of thing. 48ers is a lot of what I was going for and still haven't reached as for a minimalistic approach that's also appealing the to eye.
- The "Getting results" javascript is a real nice usability touch. Nice enough that honestly, would you mind if I implemented something similar when I get back to working on my own site? I prefer not to blatantly steal :)<p>Suggestions:
- It's a little slow. Not sure what your backend is, hopefully you're using something that allows you to submit all your requests at once and handle each as a callback. If you are, I would suggest benchmarking your requests to figure out which are your slowest ones and making sure you make those first. I shaved 10-30ms per uncached request by making my request to Facebook the first request I launched rather than the last, as it was the slowest API to respond.<p>- Are you caching results? I did a search for "Epic 4g" (as I want to know when it will be coming out) and then immediately hit search again and it took a bit for that next request to load. I would really suggest you cache at least the data (as I'm doing) if not the entire results page (as I will probably move to with nginx caching modules) for x seconds/minutes and it will save you bandwidth costs, especially for those trending topics which may get a lot of concurrent hits if you app ever scales to appreciable traffic.<p>Only question I really have is do you have a plan for advertising other than Adsense? Adsense is going to have a hard time matching ads for search result pages.
Can you explain a bit more about how you actually get this data in real time? Are you scrapping these sites? Doing REST calls every x seconds. Or using the streaming API for twitter?<p>Are you storing any of this data persistently? Can I do historic searches on any term, or just something that was indexed before?<p>Are you planning on adding any sentiment analysis? Or any other analytics on the data, assuming you are storing it.<p>Do you have an API or plan to support an API down the road. What's your monetization plan?
I'm not sure what this does differently from every other search engine, or search engine aggregator?<p>Aggregating results via third party APIs is a neat, although old, stunt -- but doesn't exactly translate into a startup business to compete with search engines.
If I search for a hash tag I would prefer to only get stuff that actually has that hash tag in it. For example, searching for #mac return lots of tweets about mac and cheese, which isn't all that useful.
Have you considered adding RSS feeds on the search result pages, or would this not fit in with your eventual business model? It would certainly make me use the service at any rate.
I would refine the phrase "social search." To me, it means searching alongside other people with similar goals, rather than an all-in-one site for social media search.