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Comment by idoh | Hacker News Reader

That site has a ton of potential. I'm sure with some tweaks here and there it could really take off.

It made the front page of Reddit a while back. My plan was to get traffic organically, but the site is basically one big violation of Google's policies (no original content, it's all search results, etc). The site doesn't even rank for it's own name, although it did for a few days after launch, until Google took notice, and blacklisted it.

I'd love to hear ideas for making something like this indexable. Generating a bunch of quality content around search results seems difficult (see: Mahalo), but maybe there's another approach I haven't thought of?

you could pivot and make it a Mahalo treatment to Mahalo "content". actually, just thinking about that makes my head hurt.

To make it indexable you need users to enter in text. Maybe you could have a mini wiki above the search results, where users describe the search they are trying to do or what the search means, or can annotate the search. With your current UI this would be really hard. I feel like the UI is cool on first blush but sort of limits your options as far as experimentation goes.

Just brainstorming here:

- maybe the hook could be: "judge books by their covers"

- the layout is pretty slick but constrains what you can do with the site. Have you considered scrolling down? It could be a differentiator though (your current layout that is).

- When you mouse over a book, have some type of overlay function: star the book, "have you read this book? what did you think?" (leave a comment), share on twitter / facebook (a necessary evil perhaps)

- when you click on a cover, it lightboxes in and has the things listed above

- make it like a reddit, but for covers

- people who searched for x also searched for y

I actually built another site around most of those ideas you just mentioned (but changed the idea to films, as I found they worked better):

http://filmvsfilm.com/

It's basically all user-generated-content, and it actually does rank on Google for a few things, but it's the wrong kind of traffic: People aren't in buying mode, very few visitors actually click through to Amazon and buy something.

Try changing the "Buy at Amazon" to "See it at Amazon", also show who is winning.

These are basically A/B tests.

I think you'd gain a lot by:

1) Show the last 200 searches that people had made (or the most popular for the past day, week, etc.)

2) Instead of directly linking to Amazon upon clicking a book/product, perhaps you should fly out some hidden details for the item (not ajax if feasible).

3) You could also have a "Search by Author" and "Search by Topic" link that is provided when you click a book that provides more results with content.

4) Maybe allow people to create book shelves that they can explain the grouping of a set of books and why they go well together (etc!).

5) One last idea: Provide a list beneath that has a tiny bit more info - as they scroll left/right in the top list, have the bottom scroll up/down to show the range that is visible. This would help with you only linking/showing 20 or so results at a time if you let the list (text) show 100 or more.

I like this site - its cool :) I know its going against the point of the site but you could use the DOM to scrape the Product details and display them as links (you can link to any site without copyright infringement??) - if you don't want text you could always pass a small amount of info into the alt tags. If this sounds dumb feel free to ignore. But I like the idea of the site

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