Blog Surf
Productivity
blog search engine
SHOW HN2022
389points
93comments
#91of 2,570 in 2022
Top 4%of 2022 by points
How HN took it
DebatedReal support and real criticism
16 positive, 22 neutral or asking, 4 mixed, 15 critical, out of 57 comments about the project. Thread score +0.06.
Idea: 11 for, 4 againstExecution: 0 for, 10 againstDesign: 1 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clean design and curated blogs give quality results
From 3 comments
Really like it, good job! Nice color scheme, font choice, and elegant layout. One little thing though: changing a search phrase or word and doing a new search, I notice the…
rambambram on HNThis is really awesome! I love that you're curating the sites included, and it shows in the quality of the results. The world needs more specialized searches like this, and…
jedwhite on HNThank you! > changing a search phrase or word and doing a new search, I notice the results do change, but there's no way to know if it really happened. Changing a Google search,…
dbrereton on HN
Objections
Index is too small, so many queries return irrelevant results
From 4 comments
This is cool and the quality of content is great too especially to get the most known blogs of a topic (and I feel like the quality of content is better than all the blogs search…
polote on HNI searched using a keyword (kava), and got a list of random blog posts with absolutely nothing to do with kava. https://blogsurf.io/?query=kava
markdown on HNI love the idea, but I couldn’t find any results that didn’t look mostly random. I thought I’d look for posts about shooting or editing video. Couldn’t find anything close, no…
codazoda on HNThe search algorithm seems to be extremely poor. I searched for the exact blog post title of some very good blog posts which in other search engines end up in the top 5 if you…
dustinmoris on HN
Search matching is fuzzy and does not highlight matched terms
From 2 comments
This is neat, but it's quietly doing some kind of fuzzy matching with my query. https://blogsurf.io/?query=furries I actually have no idea what it's really searching for. Only…
Kye on HNYeah I think the bigger issue here is not highlighting the matched text, which makes it look like it's doing something totally random. There is some typo tolerance, so it's hard…
dbrereton on HN
Manual curation does not scale
From 1 comment
This is cool and the quality of content is great too especially to get the most known blogs of a topic (and I feel like the quality of content is better than all the blogs search…
polote on HN
Requests
Support query operators such as quotes and exclusions
From 4 comments
Love the idea, but I can't search for exact matches using quotes :(
throwawaylala1 on HNPotentially quite useful. But I ran into one snag. I searched on my friend and frequent blogger Ben Nadel. But at the top all the posts were about Angular. What I wanted were all…
rmason on HNquery operators coming soon
dbrereton on HNCurrently don't support any query operators, but yeah it would be very useful. Will add that functionality soon.
dbrereton on HN
Add more blogs and allow blog submissions
From 3 comments
I love this, it would be cool if we can submit blog to be indexed. Of course you can review first to avoid spam.
ahmadrosid on HNThat's an awesome implementation and works really neat. I have been thinking to add this capability to https://refined.blog/ . also if you need tagged blog sites you can use our…
valdect on HNCool Idea, I love search engines with content made by real people. I’m not sure how many of these you have, but you might be able to pull some more blogs from…
u2077 on HN
Per-category RSS feeds
From 1 comment
This is a super cool product! If there was some way on blogsurf to have RSS feeds per category I'm sure that would make my RSS feed curation much easier, random and interesting.…
heywoodlh on HN
Reverse link index to browse blog conversations
From 1 comment
I dig this! Since you're full-text indexing blogs with an eye towards content discovery, can I tempt you towards building out a reverse link index function to enable me to browse…
NAR8789 on HN
Questions
How are blogs distinguished from other sites?
From 2 comments
Interesting. How do you figure out which are blogs and which arent'?
applgo443 on HNThis is great. As a frequent Google user, I breathed a sigh of relief seeing ad free search results from individuals. Curious - how do you know whether a site is a blog versus…
pete_nic on HN
How is MarketRank computed?
From 1 comment
This is dope! Wondering how you determine the number of blog points a certain post gets? Is there a blog quality score that's programmatically determined? How so? It seems you…
ICodeSometimes on HN
What is the policy for accepting blogs?
From 1 comment
This is great. What is the policy on accepting blogs to be indexed?
taubek on HN
Alternatives named
Google
From 2 comments
This is cool and the quality of content is great too especially to get the most known blogs of a topic (and I feel like the quality of content is better than all the blogs search…
polote on HNGoogle has been giving me a very hard time for a while. It's time for SEO to die. We need stuff like this.
pomokhtari on HN
Technorati
From 2 comments
This is definitely very cool as I've been looking for something like this since technorati (which was originally a blog search engine). Would love to hear details about how you…
superasn on HN> This is definitely very cool as I've been looking for something like this since technorati (which was originally a blog search engine). Technorati was one of the inspirations…
dbrereton on HN
Hacker News search
From 1 comment
This is neat, but it's quietly doing some kind of fuzzy matching with my query. https://blogsurf.io/?query=furries I actually have no idea what it's really searching for. Only…
Kye on HN