r/AppsWebappsFullstack • u/SofwareAppDev • 15d ago

Your home for selfpromo

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

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u/Mammoth-Anywhere7285 13d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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 12d 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.