5 ms·

Show HN: A new search engine for finding leads

37 points by friendly_chap 3y ago

Hey folks, There has been some talk about search engines here so I thought maybe I'd share a new project I'm working on. Built it partly to help me sell my own projects. Still a lot of work to be done but would be happy to get feedback. Very early phase so don't trust your life with it. Cheers --- Edit: if anyone needs a free/no CC account just DM me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/crufter/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/crufter/

piterrro 3y ago
The website says: >Find your next lead with a search engine that dares to be DIFFERENT. Can you tell me what's different than yellow pages about this search engine?
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  Probably I didn't get the following idea across properly: this is not searching a company dataset. This is just like Google - as in it searches web pages, but with the added ability to filter by owning company industry, size, location, or later once we support it even stuff like tech stack used etc (in that regard it's somewhat adjacent to tools like Wappalyzer), or the HTTP headers present, or any kind of crazy stuff. If that's still not unique enough (not sure TBH) I guess I should adjust the copy :)). I'm not great at writing copy. Anyway this is still no a fully fleshed out idea, mostly just scratching my own itch and conquering the difficulties of storing billions of pages. Thanks for the question and any feedback is appreciated.
  - LaundroMat 3y ago
    Can you describe that itch?
    - friendly_chap 3y ago
      Basically I have at my fingertips a lot of tech brainpower who can knock out products pretty quickly. Being techies our sales chops are subpar so I thought about owning the data myself and learning the ins and outs of sales through getting closer to the industry. At the same time this project forces me to handle data at scale (few terrabytes currently but I estimate we will need about 2 petabytes of storage realistically at minimum) and that comes handy for AI related projects. That's pretty much my personal motivation for this.
skeptrune 3y ago
I didn't really understand what it was doing until I actually searched. Not quite intuitive that it's web search but oriented around companies I guess. Is that what it does?
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  For now pretty much, all filters are company oriented currently. In the future this will change.
giankam 3y ago
Hard to understand what it does and the idea behind. In this state I would not limit the search engine results to give the opportunity to fully grasp the idea and benefits.
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  That's definitely a sensible suggestion - to be fair I expected the sufficiently interested parties to DM me for a free account - I did not word my intention sufficiently but at this stage we are looking for salespeople to give feedback.
leobg 3y ago
Is that based on scraped LinkedIn data?
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  To avoid getting ourselves into trouble all I can say for now is that we have not scraped LinkedIn. We do index the websites ourselves though, we are not using Google or any other parties. The goal is to collate biz intelligence from a lot of sources and augment a normal web index that way.
  - leobg 3y ago
    Haha, gotcha. I worked on something similar and may have additional sources specifically for Europe. You find my email in my profile.
Towaway69 3y ago
Wow, did a search for Node-RED and got a new lead! The other result was a open instance of NR - that shouldn't really be there... But 50% success rate for me :) Good job, looking good :thumbsup:
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  I'm more surprised to hear that than you are, haha! Jokes aside that is really great to hear. Our index size and data quality is probably 2% of where I want it to be - but it takes a lot of computing power and effort to get there so I decided to sniff around for feedback sooner than later. So your positive feedback is very much appreciated, thank you.
  - Towaway69 3y ago
    If it's OK, I'll ping you on linkedin and beg for freebie account. Beg since I'm really not your intended audience, just a tech dude on the look out for gigs!
    - friendly_chap 3y ago
      Sure thing no worries, happy for any users or feedback at this point :) Cheers
D-Se 3y ago
This is great, found a bunch of leads. Surprisingly accurate for the 3 languages I tried if the search is general enough. Quite limited when trying to find the website of a specific company. Some feedback: -The industry filter should be case insensitive - perhaps an option to filter to 1 main url per company, had multiple searches where the same company occupies the top 2 results - the filter list "grows" when you do a search, then add new words to the search bar.
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  Thank you for your kind words! > industry filter should be case insensitive Will fix! > Quite limited when trying to find the website of a specific company Yeah so the index is not entirely complete and/or correct. The goal for now is not to be perfect but to produce different results than your usual search avenues to broaden your horizons.
usernamed7 3y ago
i could not figure out how to use this. It would help to show some examples or one-click ideas. (and yes, i am someone who could use B2B leads).
- friendly_chap 3y ago
  We are working on improving getting the idea across. It's just a search engine with a bunch of extra filtering capabilities - at the moment those filters are all related to the website owner companies' metadata (industry, size etc).

37 points by friendly_chap 3y ago

piterrro 3y ago

The website says: >Find your next lead with a search engine that dares to be DIFFERENT. Can you tell me what's different than yellow pages about this search engine?

friendly_chap 3y ago
Probably I didn't get the following idea across properly: this is not searching a company dataset. This is just like Google - as in it searches web pages, but with the added ability to filter by owning company industry, size, location, or later once we support it even stuff like tech stack used etc (in that regard it's somewhat adjacent to tools like Wappalyzer), or the HTTP headers present, or any kind of crazy stuff. If that's still not unique enough (not sure TBH) I guess I should adjust the copy :)). I'm not great at writing copy. Anyway this is still no a fully fleshed out idea, mostly just scratching my own itch and conquering the difficulties of storing billions of pages. Thanks for the question and any feedback is appreciated.
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  Can you describe that itch?
  - friendly_chap 3y ago
    Basically I have at my fingertips a lot of tech brainpower who can knock out products pretty quickly. Being techies our sales chops are subpar so I thought about owning the data myself and learning the ins and outs of sales through getting closer to the industry. At the same time this project forces me to handle data at scale (few terrabytes currently but I estimate we will need about 2 petabytes of storage realistically at minimum) and that comes handy for AI related projects. That's pretty much my personal motivation for this.

skeptrune 3y ago

I didn't really understand what it was doing until I actually searched. Not quite intuitive that it's web search but oriented around companies I guess. Is that what it does?

friendly_chap 3y ago
For now pretty much, all filters are company oriented currently. In the future this will change.

giankam 3y ago

Hard to understand what it does and the idea behind. In this state I would not limit the search engine results to give the opportunity to fully grasp the idea and benefits.

friendly_chap 3y ago
That's definitely a sensible suggestion - to be fair I expected the sufficiently interested parties to DM me for a free account - I did not word my intention sufficiently but at this stage we are looking for salespeople to give feedback.

leobg 3y ago

Is that based on scraped LinkedIn data?

friendly_chap 3y ago
To avoid getting ourselves into trouble all I can say for now is that we have not scraped LinkedIn. We do index the websites ourselves though, we are not using Google or any other parties. The goal is to collate biz intelligence from a lot of sources and augment a normal web index that way.
- leobg 3y ago
  Haha, gotcha. I worked on something similar and may have additional sources specifically for Europe. You find my email in my profile.

Towaway69 3y ago

Wow, did a search for Node-RED and got a new lead! The other result was a open instance of NR - that shouldn't really be there... But 50% success rate for me :) Good job, looking good :thumbsup:

friendly_chap 3y ago
I'm more surprised to hear that than you are, haha! Jokes aside that is really great to hear. Our index size and data quality is probably 2% of where I want it to be - but it takes a lot of computing power and effort to get there so I decided to sniff around for feedback sooner than later. So your positive feedback is very much appreciated, thank you.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  If it's OK, I'll ping you on linkedin and beg for freebie account. Beg since I'm really not your intended audience, just a tech dude on the look out for gigs!
  - friendly_chap 3y ago
    Sure thing no worries, happy for any users or feedback at this point :) Cheers

D-Se 3y ago

This is great, found a bunch of leads. Surprisingly accurate for the 3 languages I tried if the search is general enough. Quite limited when trying to find the website of a specific company. Some feedback: -The industry filter should be case insensitive - perhaps an option to filter to 1 main url per company, had multiple searches where the same company occupies the top 2 results - the filter list "grows" when you do a search, then add new words to the search bar.

friendly_chap 3y ago
Thank you for your kind words! > industry filter should be case insensitive Will fix! > Quite limited when trying to find the website of a specific company Yeah so the index is not entirely complete and/or correct. The goal for now is not to be perfect but to produce different results than your usual search avenues to broaden your horizons.

usernamed7 3y ago

i could not figure out how to use this. It would help to show some examples or one-click ideas. (and yes, i am someone who could use B2B leads).

friendly_chap 3y ago
We are working on improving getting the idea across. It's just a search engine with a bunch of extra filtering capabilities - at the moment those filters are all related to the website owner companies' metadata (industry, size etc).