Creating a search engine to help people find files on the internet
I have been in situations in the past where I needed to look for files on the internet. For example, I might need to find a PDF of a tax form, an excel template for accounting, or a word/PDF file for a textbook.
I was wondering if it might be helpful to build a search engine specifically for finding files. So I put together an MVP to explore this use case and have been using and fine-tuning the ranking system over the past week. Here are a few gifs of how the search engine works: https://imgur.com/DXQcge8 and https://imgur.com/uKYUmHg
What do you think?
Would you like to be a part of my beta testing group? I plan on releasing a beta version of the project by next week. Please let me know by adding a comment if you are interested.
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Interesting, would love to explore the beta.
Are you doing a google "filetype:" search in the background, and putting a preview function atop the results?
As others said, you can start with a niche. E.g. someone created a search engine for research papers only, and it got very popular.
I was thinking the same, for a specific niche (for starters) this could work
Asking students what kind of PDFs (niche related) they have more often problems in finding and what meta data would be interesting when doing a search.
Also, curious - how would you deal with pirated content?
I think you’d just only link/index files that are publicly available and have robots.txt settings on allow
Can you niche down? "Previewing files" is too broad. Can you narrow it to something like "Search, find & preview all PDF files that my local government puts online"?
How do you intend to make money with this?
You can do this on Google by using file type operator.
iris dataset filetype: pdf
If you want people to use your platform, you need to figure out your USP.
Yea, however I don’t think Google allows us to preview most files within the browser. My app has integrated file viewers to help the user experience be more seamless