Recent Blog Entries
Introducing 9rules Search: Member Content Plus A Whole Lot More
Written by Mike Rundle on September 19, 2006
(Quick query links: iPod Shuffle, President Bush, Paris Hilton, Ferrari)
Since November 2005 we’ve been storing our member’s content in our database because we knew at some point we’d have a pretty good amount of data to work with through search and other means. The first year or so of 9rules existence was about grouping great content together, and if I had to categorize the next year I’d say our goal is to now distribute this content in interesting and meaningful ways and 9rules Search is the start of this next big push. We have over 31,000 articles to work with (growing hourly), along with thousands of Notes entries, and we’re focused on bringing that content to users in ways that make the most sense to them. If I had to define Web 2.0 using the most simplest terms, I’d say that it’s just about giving people interactive and personalized access to the content they value.
9rules Search took about 3 full days of work spread out over 3 weeks, and the entire application is only a few hundred lines of PHP thanks to the wonders of open APIs and RSS. Here are some features:
- Sorts 9rules matches by Title and Content, with each group sorted by freshness. We perform a literal query match on your search term so “prototype” is better than “prototype javascript library” and “iTV” is better than “Apple iTV coming in Spring hopefully”.
- Additional matches are displayed in a panel that can be slid up or down depending on if you’re interested in digging deeper through the results.
- Communities are integrated: go directly to the Community associated with that particular entry if you want to read more on that topic.
- If there aren’t many 9rules matches then we pull in results from Technorati. (Technorati API is really slow so it might take a little bit of time to load, soon we’ll load them via Ajax like the other results so it doesn’t hog the page load.)
- Flickr images are displayed in the sidebar as a 4×4 grid collage, each image is clickable and can be seen full-size.
- YouTube videos are displayed under Flickr with title, length, username and rating information alongside a thumbnail.
- Flickr and YouTube results are pulled in via Ajax so they don’t disrupt the page load time, note the cool spinner!
I’d like to go into the technical aspects of Search, but not right now… we’re still tweaking and fixing stuff 
Obviously some oddities might still be in there so please let us know if you find anything! Enjoy!
September 19th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
It is nice to see 9rules always looking to improve the usability for the community rather than just for themselves. It’s definitely nice to see.
September 19th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
It’s pretty damn cool. It’s strange - often I’ve searched for something through Google, found the site I want, and it’s had the leaves on it. So this is a way to cut out the middle man, perhaps!
One thing on the show more/less button - when more is shown, perhaps the arrow graphic should change to up (reduce) only? I went to see if I could get more more, and obviously it didn’t happen.
Keep bringing out cool features!
September 19th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
It’s about time 9rules had some basic search feature.. but you went above and beyond the call - searching member content, flickr, youtube and technorati! Kudos Rundeezy.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Very well thought of Mike. First building the database slowly and then using a PHP app. to query the db to give amazing speed to search.
Integrating Flickr, Youtube and Technorati is a nice touch, but its making the entire page slow. Why don`t you use checkboxes below search to let user select what types of content they want. By default all can be checked, but if someone wants to opt out, he can also easily do that. Just a suggestion.
But overall, the feature is simply great and is definately going to give entire 9rules members more visibilty.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
I think this is great. One comment though - I think there should be a search box on every page - people are likely to miss the search button at the top.
September 19th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Search box is being added tomorrow Ben. We know the importance of getting a box in every header and it shall be done. We just wanted to get this out the door since the tech itself is ready.
Ankit: How slow is the page for you, because on our end it’s pretty instant.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
Man, this is great! Truly impressive. When I saw “Ferrari” being one of your example searches, I wondered if it would find it mentioned in my last game review. And sure enough, it’s at the top of the member content section. Awesome!
September 19th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Scrivs: Search is pretty fast. The only thing is since you have to retrieve data from few external sites, they are taking their time. I don`t think thats something which can be fixed.
Though Ajax waiting wheel is pretty cool, and it loads images in the background, meanwhile one can go through the text content retrieved from the local DB.
Good job.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
I wonder if this includes the 9rules blog as well.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Yes Kyle it does.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
[...] Announced on the 9rules blog, the 9rules search feature is a realisation that this isn’t just an elitist community of a select few blogs but it is a community bringing together the very best of the independent web. [...]
September 19th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
This is definitely pretty sweet, and will probably be used instead of technorati for most of my blog searching now.
@Kyle: Yea, it does. A search for “9rules search”
September 19th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Whoops, I was beaten to it.
September 19th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Ah, awesome. I can’t wait to become a 9rules member ^__^
September 20th, 2006 at 1:49 am
9rules Adds Community Search Engine…
Blog network 9rules has developed a custom-built search engine for its members content. I’ve always admired 9rules’ philosophy (note: R/WW used to be a member), because they’re all about original content and design. Now they’re trying to make it ea…
September 20th, 2006 at 3:53 am
Nice work guys - really nice.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:52 am
Congratulations!
The results page is simple yet gorgeous and love the fact that you rope in Technorati as a back up. I would user test for whether it makes sense to have a default “Try this search on Google”. (or Yahoo!) at the very bottom of the results page. You can trigger the Google Search only if a user clicks.
With this you would have: Search 9r > Search the blogsphere > Search the web.
September 20th, 2006 at 9:13 am
[...] Yesterday we launched 9rules Search and not too far after that 9rules Member Cavemonkey (Ronald Heft Jr) created a Firefox search plugin. Now you can get the kickass 9rules Search results immediately from anywhere on the web through your browser. [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 9:24 am
For the content search, have you thought of using a Google Mini for searching?
http://www.google.com/mini
It would give much better results than just some mysql queries, you could also feed it XML/RSS feeds.
September 20th, 2006 at 10:08 am
C: Our content search goes through our member’s content, not the whole web. Therefore we would have to set parameters on the Google search that would only use our 200+ sites.
September 20th, 2006 at 11:18 am
[...] Bloggnätverket 9rules har gjort alla sina medlemmars bloggar sökbara. [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
[...] Yesterday, 9rules launched a search tool which searches 9rules’ member’s articles, 9rules notes, Technorati, YouTube and Flickr. [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
[...] 9rules has launched network wide search If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to the Free ProBlogger Newsletter [...]
September 21st, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Scrivs: It’s not the google public crawler. The Google Mini, is a hardware/software solution that you can buy, and can configure via it’s web control panel what to crawl, and/or feed.
So you could configure it to read user’s RSS feeds, index only the content that links from the RSS feed.
Thereby having the latest results in the index.
September 21st, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Yeah, it’s a nice little piece of hardware, but it’ll run you about $2k for 50,000 documents.
September 21st, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Yup, that’s what I thought it was… couldn’t remember for sure though. Looks like a cool little box I’d like to have on my desk instead of in a rack somewhere
September 22nd, 2006 at 11:14 am
Not very nice on your desk, it’s a noisey little so and so!
September 28th, 2006 at 1:49 am
[...] Searching for top notch content from the top bloggers? The 9rules Network has recently announced “Introducing 9rules Search: Member Content Plus A Whole Lot More”, their new 9Rules Network search engine service. [...]
October 4th, 2006 at 7:14 am
[...] 9rules has launched their new Search page which not only searches results across the 200+ sites in their network, but also pulls results from Technorati, Flickr and YouTube to truly bring search to the Web 2.0 world. Surprisingly quick for the information they pull in due to the use of AJAX loading for the YouTube and Flickr search results.read more | digg story [...]