New Search Engine - Thoughts?

[aidantrent]

So I finally got off my ass and started working on an adult search engine for photo galleries. I've been kicking this idea around for over a year, but this past week I finally set it up. I realize shitty search engines are a dime a dozen and most people use Google when they want teh pr0nz, but I think there might be room for a quality engine specializing in the nuances of gallery indexing. Anyway, it's online at http://eveknows.com, and there's a blog detailing the development at http://blog.eveknows.com.

I'm still getting things sorted out, but I thought I'd ask for some comments here. What do you guys think?

[smutx]

not bad, but maybe you can use a smaller thumb & the same sizes for all thumbs

[aidantrent]

not bad, but maybe you can use a smaller thumb & the same sizes for all thumbs

Yeah, I'm still debating whether to crop the thumbs to something like 100x100. It would have to be all automatic though (I've got a spider going through ~15,000 galleries/day), and that might lead to some shitty cropping. I figured for now, play it safe and display the whole image. You're right though, the different sizes are a bit jarring.

[Cerber]

Pretty damn fast... good work.

[aidantrent]

Pretty damn fast... good work.

Thanks! I just bought a dedicated box for it yesterday and couldn't believe the speed increase over the shared server I'd started on.

[rainer]

It seems pretty good.

For the thumbnails though, I wouldn't do 100x100 all the time, do a fixed width but variable height - that way everything lines up horizontally and you don't end up with the image stretching.

[Kaylum]

good idea.

i would suggest follow in the footsteps of the existing mainstream/adult SE's and improve upon them. you can add some cool bells/whisltes to improve the user experience though:

- site preview
- site rating
- image/thumb preview

ajax is your friend ;)

very cool, keep going.

[aidantrent]

Cool, thanks for the tips!

[Cradle]

not bad at all my friend

[tigrrra]

looks really good i like it and it works great too

[aidantrent]

Awesome guys, glad to hear it's working well! Last night I worked out a cropping method to get smaller, equal-sized thumbs as smutx suggested, so the quality of the thumbnails should be improving as new galleries are indexed. I think today is going to be spent on the summarizing function--I need some way to pull the first grammatically-correct paragraph from the site, so that I skip all of the links at the top. The current code doesn't seem to be nearly accurate enough. Anyone have any ideas on how to do that in Perl?

[aidantrent]

Alright, the new cropping code is working and I've made some decent improvements to the summary extraction and fixed some bugs in the indexer. I've cleared out the previous database and started the spider from the beginning. In another day or two the database should be better than ever

I've also started taking submissions at http://eveknows.com/submit.cgi. Submit your galleries and they'll be added to the spider's queue for indexing.