Please review/comment www.shrugle.com

nice layout, fast, easy on the eyes = B+

if you will be sticking to the 'current tags' list, you might be in for a large headache, and frustrated visitor bounces. i'd suggest when you open the site up publicly to expand that or add more 'tags' to the current tag pages or be very discret with the amount of websites you include.

just my 2 pennies

clean look and fast but i think it need a bit more meat and an explaination what the the site is suppose be i kinda didnt get it. i try searching for fishing didnt get much back.
its alot work running a search engine good luck with it!
but the main thing its fast and that is what people want.

i am also working on redoing my search engine fishseekers.com

Thanks too Bluesteel.

How clear is it (what the site is all about) now to you ?
It certaintly is hard work, but good fun too (nice site yours, more niche focused). One of our other problems (as anyone) is how to get people (webmasters) subscribe to Shrugle. Any idea's perhaps ?

honestly i hadno clue if it was a nitch site or just a general search engine.
yea fun when everything works fustrating when it don't.
i had spidered about 70% of of my links then i email all the sites telling them they were added and they could opt out or make changes to there listings.
for the rest ther were add in by users them selfs i have had the site since 1999 it take time for it to grow.
my partner added a news feed today on the front page.
gotat fig out way to get traffic toy uoir site and try and make is popular for me i cant compete against googles so i find my small spot in the world of the internet.
and i am still trying to fig out how to get people to use my site.

Tommy

This site looks great. its clean and simple, though I am at a loss as to why the tags all appear as different size fonts. i think its kind of irritating. I dunno. you should deff create a spider to crawl the popular index sites to build your references, butif you just want people to submit to you, keep posting on sites like these and add in a site submission form on your page. I would be more than happy to submit my site to an up and coming search engine.

RSG Consulting

Thanks again for all your comments.

The idea of spidering and optout mails we certaintly take into account. We have increased the taglist (about 55 now). We are brainstorming for adjustment on this one. The faq regarding tags is adjusted (tags are related to the most up-to-date site.. the bigger the tag, the more recent the update). Submitting can be done via 'join' on homepage, 'submit' via login and more.. Hopefully this makes things more clear ?

Any other comments/suggestions/tips, please ?

www.shrugle.com
[email protected]

When I enter the site I really don't have any idea what it is or what it does. Maybe you should add a few sentences to say what exactly the website does?

The Tag box isn't helping much either, to me it just makes the site look very complicated. If you want to have a tag box, why not make it smaller?

I guess you have read a book on branding and you are really good in that, but you should perhaps first build the site as easy to use, let people to know what exactly your site does and then start to apply that branding. For example, under the text box is a link "Shrug it!", now I don't have any idea what it means, could it mean like "search" since the page looks a bit like a search engine? I'll try by writing "food" to the box and hit "Shrug it!" and I get a list of:
"Lorain music & vending co",
"liferaft training ",
"media contact information",
"Unique Handcrafted Greeting Cards, Personalized .... "
And at last, something that relates to food: "NYC pet food delivery: organic pet food online i.... "

Thanks for your feedback, jv16. Some good points and we made some adjustments as you can see now.

The shown tags have been reduced on the homepage in numbers, which should result into a more steady look (also as per rsgconsultant's comment). We are still working on this item (alignment, etc.). The crawler produces a list of results that matches with the typed in keyword, based on a minimum keyword-frequency. It is then up to users to decide how interesting it really is. Some results shown are still from tests. This will be cleaned.

Does the homepage makes it more clear as to what we do now ?
(Bluesteel and jv16, what do you think of it?)

Again, thanks for all your feedback.

OK, now I think I got the idea: it's some kind of searchable link directory, is that it? I guess you could also call it a search engine but with a database of only 259 sites it seems more like a link directory to me.

I think you should still add more text to the front page. For example you could add a slogan or some short description under the logo, "The search engine that gives the most relevant results", or something like that would make it clear for everyone what the site does.

But there's a big problem with the search engine, it doen't search very well. For example, all the following search words show up websites that don't seem to have any relevance to the search word used:
design
books
food
toys
and so on and so on. You really have a lot of things to do in order to improve the search algorithm (especially the sorting algorithm which decides which results are the best and should be shown first)

Another thing is that the layout of the results page has a very limited width. Why doesn't the result page could just have the width of the browser? Like in Google, for example. That way you could show more description text of each hit.

Proves the point how difficult beating Google is .. Anyway, thanks again. We are very much looking into it.

Just another question .. Why do people here not start to submit their site to us ?
We would love to know so we can take that into account as well .. (note, so far we are trying out only here, on tWMF).