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.