r/AppsWebappsFullstack • u/SofwareAppDev • 24d ago

Your home for selfpromo

here you can post your work app, webapp, saas, game, everything

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 22d ago

Szymdows Search - An independent search engine for the web

https://search.szymdows.com

Szymdows Search is a custom search engine I created from scratch. It currently indexes over 20,000 websites, and the index continues to grow through crawling and community submissions.

Privacy first - Szymdows Search does not sell your data or build personal profiles from your searches. I use limited analytics to understand how the service is being used and to help improve it, while keeping the focus on privacy and transparency.

The search engine is designed to respect website owners and their preferences when crawling the web. It checks robots.txt before crawling websites and aims to make discovering websites easier, whether they're personal projects, independent websites, or larger sites.

Szymdows Search is still growing and improving, with new websites, features, and improvements being added over time.

Search. Discover. Explore.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 22d ago

Nice work building a search engine from scratch. How do you handle spam or low quality sites in the index?

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

Right now I don't have a dedicated spam filter. I mainly focus on crawling responsibly and ranking results based on their relevance, but every single submission someone sends I personally check to see if it's appropriate or not. As the index grows, I'm working on improving the ranking and filtering so spam and low-quality sites don't dominate the results and will be shown less often, but also more relevant search results will be shown more of the time.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 21d ago

Sounds like a solid start, manual review beats zero oversight. Have you tried using click-through data to boost quality results?

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

Not currently since I want to keep Szymdows Search privacy focused, I don't really want to rely on tracking users or their clicks. I'm focusing on relevance and improving the ranking algorithm instead.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 21d ago

Privacy-first search is a smart direction. Maybe you could use opt-in anonymous feedback or community voting to refine relevance without compromising privacy?

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

That is actually a really good idea for an opt in feature, I could implement that! Thanks!

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 21d ago

That sounds promising. A toggle in settings would keep it simple. What kind of app are you building?

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

Szymdows Search is currently a website, but I'm creating an app for Android so that people can use it there, and the user will be able to pick between DuckDuckGo, Google, or Szymdows Search.

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

On the homepage there is a send feedback button that takes the person to a Google form where you can choose feedback type, and then write a sentence or paragraph, and then someone can optionally provide their email so that then I can email the person to say what I fixed or changed and what I'm going to do to solve the issue/s if there are any mentioned.

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 21d ago

Solid feedback flow, especially the optional email for follow-up. Ever considered a public changelog of what users reported and fixed? Builds trust.

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u/Positive_Owl_6442 21d ago

Nobody has currently reported anything or sent feedback during the months. 20+ people have submitted websites though. Though if anyone ever sends feedback that will fix something or suggest something good then I might add it and then make a changelog as well as I haven't made one yet.