Website review please

It reminds me way too much of google.

Welcome aboard bfernalld,

We do ask that you critique & help others before you post one of your own, so if you could do this then I'm sure that you'll get all the feedback you need.

Do google know you've taken their template? or did Google steal yours...
Sorry it does look way to much like google...
DavidJaymz

Not an original response but to me it is way too familiar .. and I must be the only person out there who doesn't use Google.

I tried searching for three items I had searched for previously today. One item (bitmagic) came up with no responses. Another item (website critique) came up with four totally unrelated responses. And the third item (graffiti) came up with a few useful responses that I didn't get with the other search engines.

'Link to Scrale' and 'Scrale on your Site' resulted in a 404. I found the bolded 'Our Friends' (on the homepage)slightly distracting/annoying.

It was pretty quick loading (I'm on dial-up). I like the categorisation - one reason I use Northern Light. The pages appear clean and I did not come across any grammatical mistakes (a big plus in my books).

Annette

Webmistress- I'll review 3 sites a few minutes after posting this. Sorry, I should have read the rules...

Thank you Annette for your input. Honestly, that's the best input and help I've gotten on the site so far (it's been open about a week).

I've played with the layout some more. Hopefully (fingers crossed) this makes it's less like Google and more like what it's supposed to be- simple. I fixed the link "add.html"- I have recently ended a service I was going to offer, but decided it wasn't worth doing. In the process, I seem to have deleted this file. Oops.

I also moved the "Our Friends" and other links on the homepage around- hopefully, this is less irritating

Hehe, not point fingers, but go to http://www.searchateer.com and search for anything. The brownish barn is IDENTICAL to Google! I kind of want to know how the owner implemented the same 'Search took x.xx seconds'...

Thanks again for all your great input!
Brian

I let my site lay dormant for a few months, than recently I got back into it. My site (http://www.scrale.com) was a basic search engine, but I recently added an anonymous surfing feature to each link in the engine (do a search on anything, and you'll se what I mean). Of course, there's the option to surf to any site outside as well. The service is IDENTICAL to http://www.Nethush.com, though on Scrale there aren't 6+ ads on each page.

I JUST installed it (meaning a few hours ago) and have tested tons. However, a user always seems to find an error at a bad time, so if you could look at my site and tell me if you find any errors, I'd appreciate it. Any other comments would be great as well.

Thanks,
Brian

P.S. I'm looking to trade links as well (aren't we all). If you have a site that is related to searching in any way, we could trade. You would be added to "Our Friends" section. Contact me through the contact page or [email protected].

Note: For some reason, my old account was entirely dead (bfernalld). I couldn't post anything, and I couldn't log out. I couldn't delete my old account. I deleted cookies, restarted, pressed log out 100+ times and never got anywhere. So finally, I signed up under a new name from another computer. Sorry I had to do that, but I had no choice, other than never visiting these forums. Sorry again to the admins- if you can find what's wrong with my old account, please do (also, I never did anything against forum rules, and I critiqued 3 sites under my old username).

The thing that gets me about this site is that you have copied exactly the google/dmoz look. I know there are lots of SE's/directories that pull info from dmoz but at least they try to create a unique look for themselves. The site seems to work and if you are happy with looking like google/dmoz then fine but I would still suggest a better logo!

Well it does look like google, but I wouldn't say thats a bad thing. I like google's interface, and I am sure they can't claim all rights to a simple centered template like that, so screw 'em THe only complaint I have is that your logo looks like a single photoshop filter. It doesn't look bad, but it needs a little more... personality?

Quote: The pages appear clean

sounds like a challenge

on searchtips

Try to stay away from very common words in your search terms (i.e., the, be, a, it...). - also, I think you want "e.g." (for example) rather than "i.e." (that is) - and I think I'd go with "etc" rather than the ellipsis

Webster's Dictionary describes... - "defines"?

you place "index" in double quotes, then single - I'd say pick one

you call it both a "results page" and a "result page" - again, I'd go with one or the other

Scrale always includes every search term in its searching. - possible rewrite candidate

Example: To find fun stuff for kids but not television, try "fun stuff kids -television". - should that be inside quotes?

you may want to be more consistent in the way you punctuate the end of headings - some have colons, some don't - I couldn't find a logical pattern (doesn't mean it's not there )

on Anonymous

Though your IP and other critical data is kept from other sites...

on Friends

If your site is of decent quality and has relevant content...

also, that sentence is a little disjointed

Thank you all for your comments... especially mmi .

mmi- I will go through and fix all the errors you found, and thank you for spending so much time to comb through my information, fineding ahll me spelin an gramar misstakes I'll get those fixed within a few hours.

zbose- Right on! People comment more than I'd like about my site's similarity to Google. The thing is, I DO love Google's layout, and centering a logo above a search box is certainly not an original idea, so who's to say I "stole" anything? It just looks good. Also, I'm not sure about changing my logo anytime soon, I like the way it looks now. Simple and (above all) small. Though I will take your comment into consideration.

The Webmistress- Designing my site similar to Google was a choice I made, though it certainly differs enough as it is. If you think about it, Google's site isn't anything creative, just simple. As to the DMOZ similarity, it's hard to stray too far from that. Since my site does use DMOZ, most of the content isn't rendered completely, so a lot of tables and layouts are a consquence of the CGI I use . Believe me, I've changed just about everything custimizable I could.

A few things I'd like to have a few more comments on is the anonymous service. I believe my site has got to be the only search engine/anonimizer (sp?) out there. If you know of another, please let me know. Is the service fast enough? Would you find it useful? When would you choose to securely surf? For what?

I'm actually considering taking the service off entirely due to security risks, unless I found people were using it, and using it legit. It just might not be worth it if people simple don't find a need for it. (believe it or not, the anonymous surfing thing started when I got sick of nethush.com's ads, and didn't want to pay. So I added my own service, ad-free, to use myself. Then I figured, why not add it to my engine?)

Any more comments would be great, no matter how harsh or honest. In fact, I want you to be as honest as you possibly can, as this is the only way to improve one's site. Remember, this is the internet- if you make me cry, at least you won't have to know about it.

Brian

fifteen minutes (four bucks :eek: )