Well that is shockingly good! I was not expecting somthing so good. Nice job! I would ask for one thing - the ability to turn off certain sources. Instagram is not of, and never will be of interest to me.
Edit: 2nd suggestion / feature request: add ability to 'pin' columns to a position.
3rd suggestion / feature request: ability to add scoped google columns, I would love a column that has `site:stackoverflow.com` prefixed to all searches in the 2nd column.
I agree. It is really good. But I also want the ability to select my sources. For example, I don't care about Instagram or Pinterest either but there may be people who don't care about twitter.
My recommendation is to show everything by default and let the user "uncheck" the source for now. In phase 2 may be, you could make that a User level setting/default.
One source to add: HN :). For example, I know some very well known people are very active on HN. It will be nice to pull their comment history right there :). For example, "cloudflare CTO".
Not show how I could trigger that... any thoughts? I would need to correlate that search with a person, then know that he is super active on hackernews and find out the unique username. Problem is hackernews maybe isn't SEOed super well, so your profile doesn't show up in the results....
Thank you for the kind compliment, that is appreciated :) Good feedback!
Ok I will definitely add an option to turn off Instagram and Twitter. Is there anything besides those? Not sure I want to add an option to turn off anything, trying to limit the complexity and number of options.
Pinning... could you give me some examples of columns you would always want pinned to the front vs dynamic based on relevancy? Or some example queries? That would be super helpful. I like the pinning idea though! Just need some help thinking about this.
So on scoped google columns, that is basically how it is being done right now:
https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort
Usually google search with site: is better than the site search itself. But usually I customize it a bit if it is helpful. Stackoverflow is already there, and reddit. Is there any other specific ones you would like? I can code it really quickly.
If you dislike some companies, you probably don't want to ever see their content, risk to load any kind of tracking information, or help them with an increase in traffic. I'd love too a turn off feature, or a filter of some kind
Cool! Would love to have more people getting value out of Swurl.
I will be coding a bunch of these suggestions today! What changes were you specifically needing? Just turning off Instagram? Sorry, the 1st comment was edited, so not sure what you would like.
Ok I've added a way to disable Instagram and Twitter. Is there other ones you'd like disabled? Or are you wanting to set specific ones to always show?
Right now the ones shown are automatic and dynamic. It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search. This opens up the idea of doing things like knowing you are looking for a code problem and showing stackoverflow results in the 2nd column.
I mean those are 2 very different design directions. Auto vs manual... Are you super thinking a full manual version would be good? I've found people generally use things more when it is automatically good.
I'll have to think more about this. A number of people did bring this up...
> It tries to show the most relevant columns ranked in the best order, depending on your search.
Please don't do that. It messes with muscle memory. Either have columns always in fixed order or let me customise the order. Google search has dynamic order and while usually Images link is the second one in upper row, sometimes it moves Maps there resulting misclicks. Terrible UX. There are very few cases where dynamic UI makes sense, but IMHO search is not that.
I personally enjoy a lot more when things are manually customizable, but honestly I also don't think that I represent the majority of users ! So yeah, I think that the option to trigger a full manual ordering of the columns would be another great feature :)
That is great insight. Yes auto based on data is usually what works for most. I get that the crowd here would like manual... will need to consider that. The more regular users Swurl gets, the better we can figure out the needs.
I'd appreciate being able to create custom search profiles (like Brave Goggles).
If I'm searching for a famous person, I might want Wikipedia, Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, [music streaming service(s)], Twitch, and YouTube results.
If I'm searching for medicine, I might want Wikipedia, PubChem, MedLinePlus, and Examine.com results.
If I'm searching for a question, I might want StackExchange, Reddit, Quora, and Consensus.app results.
With my regular searches, I might prefer a different search engine than Google, a different microblogging website than Twitter, etc. Maybe I'm boycotting Instagram and don't want those results to show at all?
What sources does the news tab use? Maybe it's extremely biased? Let the user decide! Maybe I want different news source profiles (one for serious, less biased sources; one for satire; one for local news; etc.)?
What about localization? FASS.se is a popular medical database in Sweden, so I'd like for those results to be displayed in my medical search profile.
It would also be cool if the results in the Google column automatically filtered out the results available in the other columns. I mean, since I already have the Wikipedia results in its own column, I don't need the Google column to hand me a Wikipedia link.
I'll stick to Brave search for now, but it's a cool tool!
Wow, this is the best feedback. A lot here that is helpful.
Search profiles. This is a good idea. But could add a lot of complexity and options to fiddle with. I'm trying to just code stuff that adds a tons of value with the least code, basically efficiency. Which Goggles/profiles would you want/need? Would help me to think about this. Trying to figure out the best way to improve this without a bunch of work/settings from the user. Maybe there is a way to solve this automatically by understanding the objective better somehow.
Wooo, love the search type examples, especially the medicine one. I'm not in medicine, so that is super helpful to know. I will be working on those ideas this week. I will prioritize added sources most people are asking for here.
What different microblogging website do you use? I will be adding a way to disable Instagram today. Been getting a lot of requests for that.
I'm just using Bing rss for news. It is the only good API that has images included for news. If you have any other suggestions for better news APIs, I'm all ears!
There is localization and some language support based on browser language/country settings. If you change that in the browser, Swurl uses that info. Never heard of FASS.se, I'll take a look. Do you have any example searches where you would really like to see FASS.se shown?
On filtering out duplicate results, I agree that is a bit redundant. But I'm thinking it should stay because on mobile you can only see 1 column at a time. It is a design quirk that could be improved... not sure what the best way is.
Brave search is really good. I wish they would open up their search results with an API, I'd switch to using them as a search source!
I immediately thought in profiles as a nice extra feature when I saw this. And I even thought that it can be done automatically based on your search query without the need for profiles, I think it would be difficult to implement though.
Thanking for voting up the profile idea! It is a good one. Do you have any example searches? That would be helpful for me thinking about this. What searches would you want to see more of something else, that Google isn't already doing a good job of?
I could code things where if something shows up in Google results, it triggers another column of content from a specific source. Just need some more examples of what people are looking for.
- Searching for travels: I might want TripAdvisor (things to do and top restaurant pages), Youtube, Images, Skyscanner, Maps, Booking, Airbnb. Ideally, I would want some blogs with places to visit and things to do, but I understand there is no single good source for this (as far as I know).
- Searching for restaurants: I might want TripAdvisor, Images, Maps, The Fork.
- Searching for tech in general: StackOverflow, HN, Youtube, TechCrunch, Medium, IndieHackers.
- Searching for learning: Udemy, Coursera, FreeCodeCamp, Youtube, Google Scholar
In the examples above, I just mentioned some examples that could be useful to me, the key thing (as I mentioned it in another comment) is to be able to customize these columns, both in source (add/remove) and order, plus the width of these columns. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with a lot of awesome ideas for profiles.
I really think this could be a great search engine experience.
It's very good (will definitely consider moving). Some user feedback:
1) Dark Mode please
2) Toggleable websites; I saw that the websites I was seeing were black-circles in the panel below the search box. I instinctively tried to click on youtube to not see youtube box. It would also be nice to have a global panel where users can choose if they never want to see a certain website.
But these^ are just me being super picky. Overall, a great UX.
Dark mode is definitely on the short list of future todos... will probably get to it in the next 30 days.
On toggleable, that is interesting feedback. It is a bit different. I wonder what made you feel like it was a toggle... The clickable round circles is a bit like iOS calendar. So it shouldn't be hugely unfamiliar. I did try playing around with different button looks before. But I'll think about this problem... thank you for bringing it up :)
What columns would you not want to see? And may I ask why? So far the comments have been mostly an option to turn off Instagram and Twitter.
As a picky user, I would like to have the option to remove a box of any website. E.g. I don't like youtube thumbnails (and don't think of youtube as a good resource), so it would be nice to have the option to remove it.
As for implementation, it should be easy to allow users to remove any boxes, right?
PS : As for the clickable round circles, if there is a list with some black circles and others white, it just feels very intuitive to click on a black circle to make it white. It could be that I don't get this because I don't use iOS.
I did just add disabling Instagram and Twitter, does that help you? You can set it in the dropdown menu on the top right.
Do you think I should add Youtube? Youtube is pretty popular with most people.
Ahhh, yes. I understand what you mean with the black circles looking at it that way.... I was thinking it would be ok since iOS calendar has black circles as primary. I did remove the circle border I had around the white buttons to try to make it look weaker. I could make it colored, to maybe make it feel better. What would you do to fix this?
As for the circles, honestly, I don't know. Since nobody else mentioned it, it could be that only I have that problem. And in that scenario, you can safely ignore it. If more people complain, maybe they will have the perfect solution.
I suppose it's my personal bias (I like minimal & clear layouts), but this current UI you got going on feels claustrophobic at best.
Since you're committing to a horizontal scrollbar, why not increase the size of columns and position the content so it feels like I am reading/looking _down_ (from top to bottom) not everywhere all at once.
Also, a better scrollbar design would be nice + individually making sure each column can be understood where it is from. In other words, some kind of a heading indicator. (You already use Icon + Source name but I feel it isn't enough.)
Maybe you already got all this planned out and you're busy with the algorithm stuff instead, if that is the case - sorry.
It should look pretty clean, unless you have a browser that always shows scrollbars. What browser and operating system are you using? I think Windows and IE might show scrollbars more. Should look good on majority of popular browsers like mobile and Chrome. But if you give me more details I can look into how it looks on your side.
I did try adding a stronger header look before... but it ended up looking too busy and heavy. Right now I'm trying to lean towards minimal and clean as possible consider the amount of data going on. If you can give me a mock up of what you are thinking I would love to see that!
You're right, I was viewing from a Windows machine (Chrome), and I haven't checked it on my Mac yet. I will try and do it on the weekend if I remember or have the time. I honestly think there's a lot you can do on the UI side, especially if you plan on having people commit to using this engine on a daily basis.
Cool, ya let me know if it looks better for you on Mac. Ya that is the problem on Windows, especially older Windows machines. I think there is a setting on Windows to make the scrollbars work more like Mac on Chrome?
Yes will be trying to improve the UI more. Please try it more this weekend and let me know any more advice you have!
Based on your feedback I've tried removing the horizontal scrollbar, but keeping the functionality. The scrollbar was a bit distracting and duplicative of the top buttons. Thank you!
I'm almost convinced that such a layout is the future of search results.
I think open sourcing the code would turn this thing into the next searx or saerx might end up picking an up an idea or two. In any way it would be great many people contributing to something like this and implement missing functionality.
Speaking of it, you can rule out any column you don't wanna see by appending a couple of rules into uBblock like these
swurl.com###twitter
swurl.com###instagram
swurl.com###youtube
swurl.com###news
swurl.com###images
Boy that was fast! Well done, thanks.
Wish you the best for your project, glad others like it as well =)
As far as UX goes another little thing I would suggest is making the flexbox columns grow instead of shrinking so that they properly utilize the entire width of the screen and as a bonus spice you could contemplate about dynamic column width where the primary column (first or possibly hovered one) is proportionate to the rest of the columns in tandem with the golden ratio. I found golden ratio is indeed a really pleasing analogy from vim splits to tiling windows widths or practically everything.
If not for making the columns disproportionate you should definitely make them utilize more of the real estate as they kind of hinder usability and UX when shrieked.
I’ve tried it on mobile and it works very well. Super smooth navigation, nothings lagging or moving in unintuitive ways.
But for me personally the preview of the next column takes up just a little too much space. Coupled with the fact that the active column has no white space on the left and is off center makes it feel a little cramped.
But I think this could be solved with a little tweaking. The overall layout looks and fells great.
I am using Kagi at the moment, but were I to use Google I’d definitely consider using this.
Great it is working good for you, that makes me very happy. Glad it is smooth and fast. I tried really hard to make it super fast and optimized and small.
Thank you very much for your spacing feedback. What device are you using to browse? I could try making the column a bit more wider and more spacing... It is a big tradeoff between information density and spacing.
Maybe give it a try for a week and let me know if you get use to it? It will take a bit of getting use to, because the density is not like most other search engines. For example Kagi only has 1 column and a bunch of empty space on both sides.
I will need to be thinking more about spacing... thank you!
I've used an iPhone 13 pro to try it out. I think just making the column on the right about half the width that it's right now would go a long way.
It's just there to show me that I can swipe to the right, not to actually be readable. Right now it takes up to much space as an indicator, but too little to convey information. I think that's what's bothering me.
I could probably get used to the main column being off-center pretty quickly, so it's really just the width of the right column.
I had a similar thought to the previous commenter. Perhaps the overflow hints could take up half of the current width, which would allow for a slightly wider first and last column. That, along with with a gradient overlaid on the sides with overflow available, fading from white at the screen edge to transparent, may provide the visual affordance you’re seeking, and the de-emphasis that seems appropriate.
I think it would be good to be able to enable and disable this column (as well as the others since you prefer some column for some research and vice versa)
It just feels weird to have results from a walled off website on a search engine, unless we specifically indicate that we have an account on this website. Similar to how we don't like submissions to paywalled articles on HN.
Is that a philosophical question? I look at the picture, think "interesting" and move on. I don't use Instagram so you should probably ask someone who does what the intrinsic motivation for looking at Instagram photos is.
I don't know but I'm eager to find out when using this. So far it has been really interesting to get a glimpse into a walled garden I normally can't access.
For most of the other people in my life, they are primarily searching for products, books, people, and ideas for recipes or various projects around the home.
So I totally see the utility of having these social media sites in the feed.
On the other hand, this reduces privacy even more than stock google, basically broadcasting your search terms to a whole bunch of bad actors, so I won't be recommending it to anyone.
We have <meta name="referrer" content="origin"> in the header. So the search terms are not broadcast. I mean it is a bunch of tradeoffs. We lean more towards speed and low costs. DDG for example may be even more private, but it is slower and needs a bunch of ads to pay for the higher server costs.
Generally Swurl is super private compared to visiting 99% of all other websites out there. But please let me know if there is anything you think I should add/change to make it more private for you, without hurting speed and costs.
Love this, I think I will definitely add an option to disable! Thank you for your valuable feedback! I just woke up to go for a run, will code this in a couple hours when I get back...
Hyperweb[1] does something similar and I prefer their UX.
The new Arc Browser[2] also has something similar implemented as a boost[3] (boost are short snippet-like extensions).
Just goes to show how less reliable Google Search is becoming because of ads and bot results. Platforms like reddit (I append 50% of my searches with "reddit") bring a more human touch. Totally agree with Paul's thoughts on reddit[4].
Obvious question about Google (and the others I guess): are you in breach of their Terms? How are you scraping results? How can you require people using this that it will continue to exist, or is it a proof of concept?
Personally I'm not a fan of endless scrolling. I never know if I've reached the end. It's also somewhat of a "dark pattern" to encourage attention.
Finally, on one search, the Instagram column contained 100% broken elements, they were the browser's default error message. My connection may have failed or something. Anyway, there was no option to refresh just that column, or individual broken elements.
Looks good though, nice UX overall.
Off topic: anyone else remember when dogpile was the new hotness? :)
I understand infinite scroll isn't for everyone. I will add a pagination option later. We have been using and optimizing infinite scroll on my other website picclick.com for many years. People usually like it if implemented well. I understand it isn't for you though, that is valid.
Yes Instagram is done by an instagram embed, and sometimes Instagram blocks aggressively. What browser are you using. I could test it some and try to figure out why it isn't working for you. Is your browser blocking Instagram embeds?
Great to hear that you think the UX is good. It is pretty different, so I am really wanting to know if people find it comfortable and understandable. The idea is in the future the amount of different columns and content in the columns would get better and support more search types. We do have reddit, stackoverflow, and others right now. But we could add a bunch more in the future for shopping, travel, coding.
lol, yep that is what I'm paying for your queries right now :) Would love to lower that cost. I'm just happy people are liking it right now. I could do subscription or ads in the future or try to find a free search source. What do people think?
I know, Kagi did a great job with getting people to pay for their value. I saw that and was impressed! I mean I would rather people pay and have no ads. I really don't like ads.
I really like this. I've been working on my own personal search engine and might use a ux like this now. Question, how are you detecting whether the results are twitter posts/users and not random twitter pages (like the twitter career page for instance)? Also have you considered adding options to create this type of view for any page that has meta tags for title/desc/image and a logo?
jawerty, thank you for the encouragement! I appreciate it. Yes if you could use this UX somewhere that could be cool. It is kind of a new idea for website UX. It would be cool for a music player.
For Twitter, I'm just using a simple url check pattern for now to trigger it. It isn't perfect, but works well enough for now: /^https:\/\/[a-z\.]*twitter\.com\/[^\/]+$/i
Yes there are thoughts for even more column types like github, or imdb. But often the meta isn't that great, or there is no API, or no good embeds. Seems like websites are more closed off now vs in the 2000-2010s.
Thanks for your response. Also that's cool you're probably right about meta tags open graph is broadly used but not uniform in their content. As for additional sites Stackoverflow and quora would be great additions.
Thank you for the feedback! Stackoverflow is already there, but it needs to be triggered by google results. For example https://swurl.com/?q=php+array+sort will show stackoverflow. I'll look into Quora.
It is really impressive.
It's been hiding in plain sight yet not implemented that people want to search specific social media sites and we add reddit or twitter at the end of our search to get those results .
Ya for real! That is basically what this new UX is trying to enable. Just more columns of views.
I've been just seeing people swiping for more on snapchat and tiktok, thinking that UX design must be good to use for evolving something else. And hit upon trying it for search.
Let me know if you have other specific search columns I should add!
I like this quite a bit. I'd consider using something like this if only because it doesn't have ads at the top (it's a low bar).
Some comments:
- it seems like the order of the columns is not consistent across searches?
- I'm on the laptop and the columns extend past the edge vertically - I can scroll but it's not ideal. I expect this isn't a problem on a bigger screen.
- personally I don't care much for the Amazon and Instagram streams, although that might depend on the user. It certainly depends on what the search target is (any way to figure out if there's a near-perfect match with an Amazon product?)
- In general I think I'd like to see Wikipedia results first, but again, depends on what kind of search it is.
- (on laptop at least) it felt a little bit too dense, IMO, but I like pretty minimalist UIs.
Thank you for the detailed feedback pschuegr! Awesome you like it.
Would you prefer the columns to be consistent, vs dynamic based on search? Google web results are always first.
The order of the columns is based on the Google result ranking. The Google results usually trigger the column ranking generally. For example Wikipedia will only show if Google returns Wikipedia in the first 10 results. Same with pushing Instagram order up. So it is trying to show you relevant columns depending on the search. It is only as good as Google is at it.
What is the resolution of your laptop? I can test it to try to see what you see.
Yes it could feel too dense. It is a tradeoff. I could make it more minimal, but less info will show. I'm trying to make it as consistent/uniform/hierarchical as possible to make it feel less busy. It is very different, I am hoping people could get use to it and then like it better... but I may be wrong there.
Thank you. That is super big. I did push Wikipedia to be more in front when it is relevant. Also I did increase the column width a good amount yesterday after everyone's feedback. I tried widening it even more, but then the images felt too big and less columns are shown. I think it is a pretty good balance right now. Please try it out more now and let me know if you get used to it.
I've been using this pretty heavily for the last couple of days and I am liking it with the exception of one issue which is becoming a deal-breaker for me: it defaults to opening a new tab, which means that back isn't useful. I could always close the tab, but I have that burned into my muscle memory. Since the shortcut for opening a new tab is also an easy one for most people (cmd-click) it seems unnecessary to force it, IMO. Your call, though :)
I just added a setting to disable "Open in a new tab". Disable it from the drop down menu on the right of the search input, and let me know if that works well for you now?
Ok based on your feedback I changed it so Wikipedia is grounded as the 2nd column more, should help with preference and making it feel more consistent. Let me know if it feels better for you now.
Wikipedia will still need to be 1 of the first 10 Google results to trigger the Wikipedia column though.
I just made the columns a bit wider based on another person's feedback, so it should feel a bit less dense and readable for you now. I hope that helps.
Just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you! I will think of adding others like Amazon.
I didn't notice this before, but the little circles on the upper left to help you navigate are great, are there keyboard shortcuts for them by any chance?
-- column for "unexpected" would be cool - "747 airplane" generated page I almost pictured before I hit enter - in a way that's good - however it would be fun to have a little more "weird" discovery thrown in there somehow --
Hrmmm, that is a great idea. I like it. Do you have an idea of a good source for that? Is there a website you like for discovering the unexpected? I guess maybe something like 9gag? https://9gag.com/search?query=747%20airplane
-- not sure about a complex solution however bet the GNOD guy would have an idea - he uses HN I think - https://www.twitter.com/marekgibney - less complex would be just grab a random result from each of the first 4 through 14 paginations of the google results? (it that makes sense?) --
sk55, I'm so glad the UX works for you! That was the big question if the different design would be intuitive for people.
I am hoping the swipe to see more columns of searches will open up a whole new direction allowing more specific searches to be seen quickly. You could just swipe between different modalities. And possibly jump to narrower ones like just looking at reddit or stackoverflow, or php documentation (need to add that later).
I don't like that there is a horizontal scroll bar, it's uncomfortable to use and I'm not familiar with them, it would be convenient to make that with the mouse leaving the left button pressed it would be possible to make a gesture from left to right and vice versa to be able to move instead of using the horizontal scroll bar
edit: I saw that it is possible to move around using the top left buttons but I find them inconvenient
This is great! If you're interested in search engine UX, I'd be interested in incorporating some of these ideas into https://mwmbl.org - would love to get your input - join us on Matrix https://matrix.to/#/#mwmbl:matrix.org
Reminds me of the days before Google, when it was common practice to repeat the same search on a few search engines, and Apple released Sherlock [1], which allowed you to perform the same search across different engines and aggregated the results.
Seems like a great UX to get broad information about a topic!
One little thing: In my opinion the labels 'Google', 'Wikipedia', 'Twitter', etc. don't need to be fixed on mobile since you already have to icons above it and it does take up a bit of vertical space.
Thank you conelion. I am super glad the UX feels great to you, and you are understanding the design advantage :)
That is a really good UX optimization find. Yes on mobile, since it is just 1 column at a time, I could remove the title label.
The label does help to anchor the column a bit more clearly and gives consistency between mobile-desktop. What do you think about that? Is the extra few pixels height more valuable? Really value your opinion!
I'll try coding it up tomorrow morning and see how it feels!
Just to be clear, I wouldn't remove the label on mobile entirely but just not make it fixed. In the sense of putting it inside the scroll container.
I only had time before to test it on mobile on my commute. Having seen the desktop version now I understand your concern. Maybe there is a way to just reduce the size of the information a bit but still keeping it structurally as is? I also think that most people can identify the source of the information just based on how it is structured (longer texts for wikipedia, youtube/twitter/reddit with its own branding, etc.) but we would need more opinions on that.
By the way, where is innovation in Google Search? I just saw news of one person who built search inside CD-ROMs of the 90s all by themselves. Why doesn’t Google do that with search and integrate it somehow?
Google Search has abandoned any pretense of finding new areas of search.
I'm still working on a reverse of google-desktop-linux-latest, they've left debugging info in it, maybe someone can liberate their old search algorithm.
What a positive surprise, I wasn't expecting something like this tbh. The UX is amazing.
I will use it for sure with some additional and essentials features for me at least:
- Ability to add and remove some columns: I have no interest in using Instagram or Twitter in my search results and I have interest in using Stackoverflow or HN for example.
- Ability to customize the width of each column for desktop: I have read in your about us page that you clearly state that “Mobile is primary”, however I would be interested in using it on my desktop on a daily basis and it would be nice to have the google column wider than the others for example.
- Possibility to customize the order of the columns: I think this is an obvious one.
Do you have any of these changes in mind for the future?
:) happy it was a good surprise! Thank you for the nice words.
Ok just added option to disable Instagram and Twitter from ▼ menu on the right of the search input. Let me know if that works good for you! Stackoverflow is there right now. Not sure how best to trigger HN, let me know if you have any suggestions on that. Probably not good to show it all the time.
I did test the Google column wider for a couple of weeks, but ended up changing it the same as the other columns. Design wise it came out that consistency was a lot more valuable for UX. Let me know after you use it for a while and get use to things, I will reconsider adding this if it still would help you!
On ordering, you mean manually? Right now I am trying to do that all automatically without thinking or manual settings, and trying to optimize for relevancy. Let me know more about your problems or ideas here.
For changes, right now based on all the feedback, seems like I should consider more sources, sort options, and dark mode?
Nice! much better now without Instagram and Twitter (at least for me), good job!
I'm going to give the Google results column with the same width a try, maybe you are right. I think it also depends on the specific user’s screen size. In any case, I would recommend you let each user decide the width of the columns.
About ordering, yes, I was referring to manually, but I hadn’t thought in automatically mode tbh, but based on relevance it is probably best as you mention now that I think twice about it. I don’t know how easy or hard is to implement this feature the right way though, it may even depend on each user specific search habits, but it just a thought.
And regarding changes, yes, those would be the must-have, highest priority, and most valuable features you can add imo.
It would be great to add Udemy and Coursera (and other edtech platforms). I had an idea about a search engine that would open Youtube, Udemy, ... and that way allow you to find learning resources really simply a few years ago :-)
Brilliant implementation. Clear and easy to read. Thanks. One suggestion (which probably follows on from others) is to give the option to disable columns and also maybe move columns? For instance Reddit is placed right over on the right on my page, requiring a scroll. I'd prefer to swap Instagram and Reddit to avoid the sideways scroll.
I also like @alfnor's suggestion for custom search profiles which could lump together specific sources for specific searches. Maybe a Premium option for a fee?
[Edit: also maybe an option to lock different columns together, so you can scroll them together to save scanning time?]
Nice work. A simple feature that I'd like to see is if I could focus on one of the columns and have it expand, use more screen-space. And +1 on the searx comments, I'd love to use such an interface there.
Quick question, in your example you did "Paul Graham y combinator". I then tried https://swurl.com/?q=breck+yunits and it worked great, so I thought that I was lucky that my parents gave me a UUID and my results worked better than PG! But then I tried your original query except without "y combinator" and the results were just as good (clearly PG is most famous PG by far). So was curious why you added the "y combinator"?
lol, your own UUID, I like that. I added y combinator just to focus the search more. I think before without it, Swurl gave a few other results that were not relevant.
So quick search in the comments and nothing about XR/VR/MR/AR or 3D Spatial Computing which is going to rebuild the search process from the ground up using a nearly infinate canvas of depth and width realestate that decompresses limitations imposed by flat screens and force the kind of ergonomic backflips to optimize information choice and density per square inch as linked out here. This is beautiful well thought out service but I can't help but think it would look better in a 3D environment in the near future.
Are you reranking results with neural nets? I'd like to have a personalised filter + reranker that can sit on top of everything else.
We need to take back control of our feeds. I think the trifecta of user control is - filtering, ranking and UI. Any of them can be used by big corporations in shady ways. Your meta search engine is already a new UI and allowing multiple sources empowers users. But we need more than that, something like customisable neural reranking or recommender systems that serve the users, not the advertisers.
Hrmm, that is some deep feedback. I thought people are really into privacy right now. For personalization I'd need to add registration and profiling and controls you need to click. Would you be into that?
What types of searches are you into? Could you give me some examples to think about, that would be very helpful. Thank you!
I would agree to personalise my filters on your system. The purpose is to stop the flood of junk and spam, to evade the agenda of whoever ranks the feeds.
I am already using such a system for scientific papers search.zeta-alpha.com, they do embedding based ranking and recommendations based on bookmarks and tags. It's 2022, I expect high end neural ranking. I even implemented such systems on my own, I know exactly how hard it is.
For example I searched on your site "Focal Loss", and I get news about "Former Longhorn Poona Ford Shines in Win over Arizona Cardinals". Search "Softmax Activation" and get "How to activate an eSIM on your iPhone". An embedding similarity filter would have rejected that, it's not even in the same ballpark.
Check out now Kagi does it. They give you privacy by not logging queries, but you have an account and pay them. You can tweak your results by creating rules to promote/demote/block different domains.
I’m not sure how I would want results re-ranked for me. Maybe some limited promotion of geographically nearby things?
Hey, this isn't working in FF for me - FF 106.0, MacOS 12.6. I thought it might be an extension, but I've tried turning off the expected culprits and nothing changes. I'm not ruling out combinations of extensions, but I'm also not going to try 30! combinations.
It looks great on Safari, though! Though I do echo the sentiment that it would be great to allow customization - let me choose the columns I want and where I want them in a layout panel.
My only major complaint is that in the "images" section you see a lot of repeated images. I know that taking all the results and doing some kind of difference check on them/finding the highest quality version is not a simple or particularly computationally quick operation - but it would drastically improve the usefulness given the small size of the window.
Yes I agree, especially with wikipedia. But I was thinking sometimes people still want it in images so they can click and get directly to the image? What do you think about that case?
If you have some more examples of queries where this is happening, that would help me improve things!
On mobile and I couldn't get it to do anything. Doesn't seem very intuitive.... You only get a few seconds of someones time when they first visit, it needs to be drop dead simple.
I see alot of other comments saying how easy and intuitive it is, so confused why I get nothing and can't figure out how to get something.
However this is literally GQ magazine implemented as a search page which overwhelms the user with irrelevant information.
That's why old Google was cool: clean and relevant. I don't see anyone looking for efficiency (not social media but a search page) would want to change that.
I agree, isn't for everyone. But I think the kids these days like as much images as possible. Seems how things are trending... I could add an option for more test focused if more people are wanting this. Because add to this thread if anyone has similar thoughts.
This is cool.
EVen adding more search engine would be really useful, search and compare result across gg, ddg, bing, brave.
Also, give the option to customize in which section to search, I don't care about images results or youtube, give the option to deselect the defaults option.
Just added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you. DDG is basically the same as Bing. Brave unfortunately doesn't give API access to others right now.
I made this my default search to give it a try. I first interacted on my iPhone - was slick. Then, interacted on an ultrawide monitor--so much information at once. I would like the ability to add sources to search. For example, search HackerNews or industry specific websites.
Wahoo, thank you for making Swurl your default search. Ya on an ultrawide, it is beautiful to see!
If you give me some more examples, I will add them. I am seeing a lot for hacker news. But how do you think it should be triggered? Show all the time, or show only in certain cases?
For industry things, it would be super helpful if you tell me some exact ones since I'm not in all industries, so I would really know first hand. Thank you!
Thinking out loud here
I frequently search:
LinkedIn
Slack
if looking up startups: pitchbook/crunchbase/techcrunch / finsmes
industry specific (insurance): coverager, insurance journal, propertycasualty360, etc
Perhaps if I logged into swurl, I could set a column to custom search one or multiple websites using a "site:" appended search (like others have mentioned)
Good thinking. Linkedin is super closed off. I tried integrating that more, but had a hard time figuring out how.
Startup sources, that is good. I could do that!
I'll look more into insurance.
Keep it coming! Love your good examples and sources.
I'm trying not to do a logged in experience right now. People really hate logging into things and figuring out options. I mean, it is a really low percentage and usage compared to the amount of coding work... But please think out more, I'll be thinking on these things!
On iPhone Safari, the bottom browser url bar + the top search input and tabs take up about 40% of the total vertical space of the screen. While usually the url bar collapses to while scrolling down, it doesn’t seem to happen here, probably since the scrolling element is nested.
Yes, sorry, that is a byproduct with this design, can't be fixed because of limitations on mobile browsers. What phone are you using? On most newer phones there is enough vertical height...
Is there any way to get google cards? Google's cards are so useful because they answer 80% of queries without the user having to go into the website (which usually takes 2-3 seconds + ads)
But I understand if google doesn't want to allow devs to get access to their cards.
Yes that would be great, but yes Google doesn't provide that. I could improve it a bit if you give me some good examples. Right now there is definitions, math, weather, stocks, maps....
This is amazing! I'd love the ability to reorder and resize search results (e.g. having Wikipedia always be on the left, then two columns of Google, etc. you get the idea.
Very inspiring to see something as old as search engine UX being rethought and redesigned, congrats!
I like it! Nowadays I usually prefix my search with ddg's bang command to narrow my search to a subset of websites. I made a tiny browser extension to include tohe commonly searched sites. What you did is bang command on steroids. Thanks for building it!
The dynamic columns based on search are cool. Not sure if you are learning from clicks, but that would be cool.
Tradeview price data is cool, not sure if intentional or a nice side effect.
Twitter results seemed to not be working, but I see they are there
Ok I checked it out more. It is getting blocked due to tracking protection. So for Twitter and Instagram, the only way to integrate it well and easily is with embeds/widgets. It is iframed in with some JS code.
So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it.
But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
Yes clicks would be cool. I could add that later if Swurl gets more click data.
Tradeview, you mean the stock price chart? Yes that is a widget we added.
Twitter results is actually done with a Twitter embed. Maybe you have some iframe blocking thing turned on? What browser are you using? It should work.
The big win for this site def seems to be provider selection. Plus reordering.
Would also appreciate some security assistance. The main reason I use Kagi is speed, the second is privacy. Adding more search providers reduces privacy, unless there is some nice proxying involved.
Need to check this out on desktop… it’s great on mobile!
I would totally be cool with swapping out other search engines, but You.com and DDG don't give any a search API, so can't do that. If you know any good other search engines that I can integrate with an API let me know :)
Just added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
Broken behaviour without google tag manager. I have disabled google tag manager, but javascript excepts it. It is generally recommended way to write javascript not to expect any spying/telemetry tooling to always be loaded.
Hrmm, thank you for letting me know! Do you have any more info on how to reproduce this problem? How are you disabling it? I'm just trying to reproduce so I can try to stop any errors breaking things. Thank you!
Personally, I much prefer search engines that work without javascript enabled at all (currently using Metager). I use strict uBlock Origin settings as well as various other strict browser settings like blocking third party cookies. I'm not sure how much of that you want to try to support (or what is causing my issue - the site does not work at all for me, even after enabling javascript), but trying on Firefox with default uBlock Origin settings if you haven't would be one way to check a somewhat common setup. Oh, my issue could also be the referer related settings as mentioned below.
Sorry, for this it needs javascript. We are using JSON APIs, it helps make it faster. I wish we could support this, but it is just too hard vs speed or costs :(
uMatrix is awesome as it disables any 3rd party domains and only loads content from main domain that author controls.
it also allows blocking by content type. Like iframes.
I believe some blockers designed for telemetry blocking, like ghostery or privacy badger, will come with js shims. So they will block google tag manager, but will load a replacement JS to make sure the page doesn't behave in a broken way.
uMatrix is more general purpose and does't do shims. Saying this, website should detect telemetry didn't load, and either still work, or display error saying why it can't proceed.
I don't want to be tracked. The options are: swurl is ok with denying users access that it can't spy upon. I am ok with that. Or swurl builds code in a way to gracefully still work if a script doesn't get load. This would be good when google tag manager has a bug and no longer works, and for users who are behind proxy/dns pihole systems or other system settings that prevent them from being tracked.
And for your reference, i enabled googletagmanager in uMatrix, but it still got blocked by uBlock origin. I suspect even if i were to disable both uMatrix/uBlock origin extensions, then my pihole would still block it.
As per using caching proxies , use dns cname. So security conscious people / paranoid configurations know that the caching proxy is in your control and wont leak cookies from other domain accesses. So define something like pix-cdn.swurl.com or static.swurl.com .
It's cool, I think a 2x2 grid might be a better layout and maybe a summarised view rather than streams e.g no scrolling. Otherwise it's a lot of information to pack into one page. It's good though.
This is something I've really wanted for a while, and the design implementation is far better than what I would probably have gone for. Very nice! Bookmarked as a new Search Engine.
Very, very nice. Don't get caught up customizing this for the HN crowd. The way it works now will have popular appeal. In any case, it is much, much better than the Google UX.
This would be fabulous for switching between brave, duck duck go, and Google. I love the UX, finally something worthwhile in the browser space. Available for purchase at any point?
I did just add Bing which is basically the same as DDG, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
Thank you! Yes for sure, that is totally on the todo list. I'll be adding all the search options later in a drop down. Just give me about 30 days to get to that. I appreciate the vote for these features, really helps me prioritize things!
haha, I totally agree. I think Google has a conflict of interest a bit there for the ranking. But if I could do that I would. At least on Swurl there is no ads.
This worked great for me except for one thing (the “back to top” button was right under where I normally scroll the page and I kept hitting it by mistake.
It would be nice if the user could manually toggle which results to show. For example for most searches I may only want to enable Google and Twitter results.
Thank you! So all the time only Google and Twitter?
The design thinking I'm going right now is less options to figure out and click, and just make it easy to jump to any source, and do the best possible to show ranked and relevant sources. What do you think? Would love more input and ideas on this!
Thank you for pointing this out. Yes this is very true, it is a pretty classic search engine problem. I think there are 2 main ways to improve this, add search related searches that could help users click to better specify, but that would need another click. Or user profiling to figure out what the person usually like, but that would require profiling.
There is right now autosuggestions, that could help suggest a better query to begin with. Is that ok for now?
Or what would you suggest to better improve this? Would love your thoughts on this.
This is fantastic! Would be nice if other things could be added, e.g. Google shopping and so on. But I will try it for a week and see what I think of it.
Just added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
logicprog, thank you! Hrmmm yes a few asked for non-google. I mean DDG uses Bing. I could use Bing too. Would you want that? I could add a switch to go between Google and Bing, but not sure why you would want that. Bing isn't as good as Google results. Let me know more about why and it would be very helpful to deciding this!
Thank you, glad it looks good for you. Yes using Google search API. Yes paying out of my own pocket right now. If you know anyone at Google that could lower the price that would be great :) Ya, not break even right now...
I'm actually in the same boat with goosh.org (also paying for it myself).
I think bing results might be cheaper at scale because I see a bunch of bigger services using it (like duckduckgo, but they will have a special deal for sure).
If I remember correctly there is also a hard limit for google results (10k/day?), so it doesn't scale even if you can refinance it somehow.
Thank you for letting me know about the back to top! I was able to reproduce it and fix the problem. Please try it again now and let me know if it works well for you now.
I made the columns a bit wider than before. I tried even wider, but when I did, it there is a line where it is too wide, especially on desktop. Where seeing more columns is better, or seeing more of a hint/peek is better. Please try using it some more regularly and let me know if you get use to it, or not :)
Neat. Search UX is at the same time extremely difficult and criminally under-explored I feel. I realize this is hard with third party data, but something I'm really interested in presenting the relationships between data, and offering means of exploring them.
One gripe with this design is that this page can't be scrolled on a PC. Or rather, it can only be scrolled vertically. To scroll horizontally, you need to grab an auto-vanishing single-pixel scroll bar. Although that's not really your fault as much as the browser designers' fixation with minimalist GUIs.
I also think it's difficult to have these many images in an interface, especially brightly colorful images of vastly different sizes with faces. They are all powerful attention attractors, and as a result, and the result is the (excellent) structure of the website doesn't quite come to flourish as much as it could.
But as I said, search UX is extremely difficult. This is a cool new take.
Thank you for the detailed feedback marginalia_nu!
Yes I agree search UX has not been evolving much. I wish it would.
What version of Windows and what browser are you using? How old is the computer? Maybe it is something I could improve. I was figuring most modern computers can scroll horizontally well, but that isn't always the case. But I guess I am trying to push the design into the future...
I think on the desktop the columns could be wider, so the preview text wraps on fewer lines and more results fit in vertically for quick eye scanning.
Did you think about having the ability to display multiple primary search engines besides Google like DuckDuckGo? A while ago I switched to DDG as my default search engine and learned to trust that the search results are good enough. On occasion, I have a FOMO and fall back to Google anyway. It would be a neat feature to have them shown side-by-side.
Another example is Brave Search. I like the ideas behind it, but will not experiment with it as a default engine as an early adopter due to possible friction. With a meta engine like Swurl I could keep having Google/DDG as the primary engine and include other emerging engines like Brave Search in another column to take it for a low friction/risk test drive (perhaps configured through URL parameters).
I would love to have a different search source, but DuckDuckGo and Brave don't give API access to their results. I would definitely add those if they opened up access to Swurl. Know anyone that could help me with that?
I was so excited I didn't think it through :) This is where wishes meet hard reality. I believe DDG has its own crawler. But they also rely on results from Bing for which they probably don't have rights to provide an API.
So at this point the only viable alternative would seem to be the Bing API.
Just added Bing, you can switch to it from the menu on the top right to enable Bing instead of Google. Please try it out and let me know if that helps you.
I found the sideswiping way too sensitive on mobile: when I just want to swipe right once I go through two maybe three pages. To scroll right just once I need to make a concerted effort to swipe just the right amount.
Scrolling to the next section works well but scrolling to a previous one feels too sticky now (requires too long of a swipe to the right for me at least).
What a great project, I'm really enjoying it. Well done!
Thank you for point that out! That could be helpful. Do you think I should implement that? Right now I still use the browser gestures too. I'm just getting better swiping inside vs swiping on the screen edge I guess...
Thank you for the feedback. There is a peek of more content to indicate it is swipe-able to see more. Kind of like websites do with images, like Netflix for example.
Do you think if it was 100%, then people would still understand they could swipe?
Your site is simple to use. This is good. It also means that users won't need much help before they are proficient. But by reducing the screen width, you're punishing your users forever. You can solve this by teaching users about the interaction up front. Try placing some text somewhere on the screen that encourages users to swipe. You can hide it once they've done it once. Alternatively, shortly after page load you can animate the page to peek the next column of content. It will require a little playing around so that the instruction is clear but unobtrusive.
What phone are you using right now? That would be helpful for me to consider. I did increase the column width from 320 to 335 pixels based on your feedback. It does feel better. But if I make it too wide, then the content can get too big I feel.
I'll be thinking more about this feedback and will test some more. Thank you!
Just for an extra data point, I really like it the way it is. Seeing a peek of the next column to give an intuitive understanding that you can swipe for more is really neat (and I'm on an iPhone 8, so not a particularly large screen).
definitely going to try and use this for a while. looks lovely.
Confuses me why i like this kind of display, and things like reddit i tend to prefer one line per article no images. But the extra search sources utilizing it is lovely.
When I first tried it, I was like "oh, so the left-most column is the ads". It was only after trying a different query that produced fewer ads that I realised the left-most column is Google :-)
I just added a setting to disable "Open in a new tab". Disable it from the drop down menu on the right of the search input, and let me know if that works well for you now?
Hrmm, the problem is with infinite scroll. Opening in new tab is the best UX I've tested that works best. Anything suggestions with that problem if I did add that option?
No. If I click the link it’s because I’m done with the search and found my target result. If I am unsure about it, I’ll open the link in a new tab myself using middle click or long tap.
That is a good point, I'll be thinking about this problem... let me know if you have any good ideas how to improve that without hurting infinite scroll. Right now I think I need to leave it for infinite scroll right, else if you click back you would lose your place.
I am honestly kind of in shock, I truly went with the mindset of let's check this new UX for 20 seconds that I'm never gonna really use but might have something cool since it's upvoted to let's see how to make this the default on chrome and give it an actual go. OP sincere congrats on the effort.
Trufa, for reals. I know how you feel. Gives me a smile that it surprised you. I'm surprised people like it so much :) I haven't shown many people before this.
That would be awesome if you made it default and tried using it regularly! Here are instructions for Chrome https://swurl.com/default.html
Ahhh, awesome you will be using it regularly! Makes me happy it is helpful to people. I will be improving things! Please email me if you have anything that could be improved. My email is on the website top right dropdown.
love it. If i could configure my google search UX to this something like this, I would. Reminds me of TweetDeck in its early days. This is a power tool for avid searchers.
You should add a cookie banner for EU users as you track users with google analytics without any consent. Also you should make it clear that the amazon results are ads and you earn money with your company with them.
Thank you. Otherwise great idea to have some horizontal view on different topics :) The idea behind that can probably also be applied to internal search results where you need to gain quick insights into multiple topics related to one keyword.
Yes the UX could be used for other search apps. Internal search is a good one, maybe searching a bunch different doc types or internal databases. Good point!
That is a good search. Please try refreshing, it should work. Sometimes Insta errors. Or doesn't work due to Firefox blocking embeds. Let me know if it works now for you.
Haha, yes exactly. That is one of the design inspirations. If people can handle columns of dense content on newspapers, figured they could on search too? I hope so.
no, still not, I checked on both microsoft edge and firefox, I checked incognito mode too
it's strange, how it's only the twitter column, instagram column once gave me an error message (something about blocking embeds? can't recall) but was at least showing something from instagram, also that went away after a refresh
twitter just has a dull grey background, like the column was left blank or something.
Ok I check FF. It is getting blocked due to tracking protection. So for Twitter and Instagram, the only way to integrate it well and easily is with embeds/widgets. It is iframed in with some JS code.
So really there isn't a way to fix it and make it work unless you don't use private mode in FF or unblock it.
But if you don't want to do that, I did add a way to disable Twitter and Instagram from the top right menu dropdown. Try it out and let me know if that solves your problem well.
Edit: 2nd suggestion / feature request: add ability to 'pin' columns to a position.
3rd suggestion / feature request: ability to add scoped google columns, I would love a column that has `site:stackoverflow.com` prefixed to all searches in the 2nd column.