Sep 172010

We are launching the Metahint beta program. If you want to test our new search engine before it becomes available to everyone, you can subscribe on the front page. We don’t ask anything in exchange, taking part in this program is completely free. We will appreciate your feedback. Tell us how useful and usable you find our product, what works and what doesn’t and how we can improve it. We will start sending out invite-codes as soon as we have the available capacity.

We will use this blog to announce launches, new features, milestones, technical details and whatever else might be of interest.

We develop Metahint because we want to make site search and navigation better. The curent search box on most websites is useful only if you know exactly what you are looking for and if you know the exact terms in which it is described on the website. We find that this is rarely the case.

With Metahint we attempt to develop a more intuitive site search. We will analyze the content of your website in novel ways and generate suggestions on the fly. In this way, we want to make it easier for your visitors to find interesting and read-worthy content. Metahint aims to achieve this while being barely noticeable. Sounds good? Stay tuned..

8 Responses to “Hello world!”

  1. lkozma says:

    This is László, just testing if comments work.

  2. ianf says:

    Whether the idea takes hold or not, I congratulate you on coming up with and deploying a topical, concise, self-referential and thus very memorable domain name – not easy in this time and age of name squatting and -hijacking.

    That said, I find your wording “when you visit a blog and you want to find interesting stuff to read, you need a tool that can present the available material in a concise form and give you choices based on what you are looking for” touchy-feely and incomprehensible. You are making an assumption that, by and large, majority of blog visitors knows what it is they’re looking for, or care to explore deeper in any meaningful way. That visitors are participants in some imaginary active and poster-reader intellectual interaction process. What planet are you from?

    Why couldn’t you just say (e.g.) [we attempt to]

    • index your site in novel and seldom used ways;

    • extract and categorize its contents accordingly to [mechanical and/or positional] frequency of discovered apparent keywords; and

    • construct an easy to overview and navigate tag-cloud/ map of the site for ease of orientation and spotting of more potential read-worthy matter (or something).

    [Additionally: lose the justified blog columns in favor of right-ragged. This is not a medium with newspaper- or book-typography, other rules apply.]

    • lkozma says:

      Hi ianf,

      good points,

      I do think that readers and writers take part in an intellectual game, but I agree that vague wording is bad. I rewrote it now, hopefully making it better. We tried to avoid technical jargon this time, and better than any description we hope to have a demo very soon.

      Good catch about the indentation, I changed the default now.

      Thanks for your comment,

  3. ianf says:

    Re:garding your advance mission statement, I still think you’re much too vague for your own good, and too wordy besides. It is not until the last, fourth paragraph of it that you’re talking some specifics of what you’re about to do, and then not very specifically at that. You need to underline that Metahint is [for] searching within a site. It is such a narrow realm of life that you might as well GO TECHNICAL, and forget about potentially alienating (imaginary, anyway) know-nothing web visitors. Do note that we live in a world in which just-introduced Google Instant search method basically obliterates current SEO practices (=search engine optimization to ye-abbrev-challngd).
    [ http://www.steverubel.com/google-instant-makes-seo-irrelevant ] Why? Because from now on everybody’s iteratively refined “final” Google search results will be unique.

    As for text column justification (not indentation, which is a good thing, unless applied undiscriminately to endlessly-indented comment trees as here ;-) ) [*], here’s the latest missive about it. [ http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-look-that-says-book/ ] Everybody should be taught this in the first grade of elementary school, right after admonition against using K3WL black backgrounds. Elementary, my dear László ;-) )

    [*] which is broken by this server, too

    • lkozma says:

      Hi, we have released a demo and we wrote a more detailed description of the idea behind Metahint. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

  4. kolixx says:

    Nice touch!

    I have some questions:

    1: is there a way to subscribe to a news letter of some sorts?

    2: when can I integrate it into my forums?

    3: have you considered timely reindexing of the sites? Our forums are quite rapidly changing.

    • ceelurd says:

      Hello kolixx,

      1. A traditional email newsletter is neither in the making nor envisaged. We will, however, share via this blog everything that you could expect from a newsletter. You are welcome to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

      You can also follow us on Twitter, if you wish.

      2. As soon as we release our embeddable search widget.

      3. Yes, we have. Details and conditions will follow soon.

      Thank you!

      • kolixx says:

        1: sufficient enough
        2: waiting…
        3: good :)

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