Bigulo ~ Searching Social Networks

destraynor

Myself and a friend have been working on site called Bigulo, which basically allows you to effectively search social networks, and peoples homepages on them.

Basically the search function on sites like bebo suck badly, so we decided to do our best to make something better.

Please head along to bigulo.com and check it out, if you're into that sort of thing. If you're not, maybe you know some people who are, please let them know


Thanks for your time,
Des


[Sample Searches to give you an idea]
25 year olds girls called Emily
20 Year old guys in Foxrock
The most viewed pages

destraynor

Over 14,000 matches for Bebo users in Dublin
http://bigulo.com/index.php?namesearch=dublin&sex=&age=0&but=Search]Check it out!

Also, for the serious cyberstalk, we now have an advanced search.http://bigulo.com/index.php?mode=advsearch]Check it!

If you know people who use Bebo, please help spread the word.

Cheers

r0wb0t

Nice one Des,

You've probably seen Gareth Stack's articles in which he suggests that Bebo is so addictive BECAUSE of the limited search facility! (I'd imagine it's not that deliberate though

http://www.tuppenceworth.ie/biglife/bebo.html
http://www.dbspin.com/archives/89

A friend of mine got a C&D after polling MySpace:
http://singlestat.us/
I'll be interested to see what Bebo's opinion of you is. Hope you make a few Adsense Bucks in the mean time though.

Btw, the advanced search doesn't work quite right. When I search for people called Nairn I get people from Nairn.
http://bigulo.com/index.php?namesearch=nairn&location=&sex=&minage=18&age=30&but=Search

What's on the backend? Just curious..

Rowan

destraynor

Cheers Rowan,

I agree 100% that the most addictive thing on bebo is certainly the random walking from page to page. Everyone I see on bebo seems to be doing just that. I don't know if its intentional though.

The idea for a search page came from the fact that I knew soo many people on bebo, and rather than going through all the poxy invites I got (from back in my non-bebo days), it's easier to search for the people i wanted. Also, it's fun to be able to check for new bebo people in Maynooth/California/wherever. Its certainly getting popular in Maynooth anyways.

As for a C&D, I kinda half expect one, but on the other hand, all we are doing is sending them their own customers, so whats the real problem? [They sound like famous last words]. The Adsense barely buys us a [CONTENT REMOVED TO RETAIN ADSENSE ACCOUNT] anyways.

The backend is PHP I didn't write it, I hate the stuff, but it works (most of the time) in this case, so if it ain't broke etc.

Thanks for pointing that out re: advance search, I'll look into it.

verbatim

That singlestat site is a very interesting idea. Pity about the C&D.

The front end is PHP, whilst the data parsing is done with perl. Your right, the advanced search doesnt work as you'd expect. When you put in something for the name it searches the persons realname, username and location. I'm sure it'll get fixed sometime. The big problem at the moment is with scalability and the speed of querys. The quality of the search results has had to be cut back to speed things up (so no wild cards are used at the begining of a search term to force the table index to be used instead of a table scan).

r0wb0t

Have you thought about using Lucene or one of it's language variants? I always mean to try them out sometime.

Cloud

Excellent work guys!

John.
--

destraynor

r0wbot: Yeah, I've just been playing with it (Lucene) there. Looks ideal for something like bigulo. Andy has been working tweaking the search speed. It's gone down from something like 70 seconds to about 5 seconds for a new search, old recent searches are cached too, which makes a big improvement.

We've added pagination for search results, and made some other small changes.

Thanks for the feedback/advice.

If anyone can think of good, free, places to advertise Bigulo please let us know. So far boards has been really good for hits, but I am running out of ideas.

Cheers,
Des

verbatim

destraynor wrote:

r0wbot: Yeah, I've just been playing with it (Lucene) there. Looks ideal for something like bigulo. Andy has been working tweaking the search speed. It's gone down from something like 70 seconds to about 5 seconds for a new search, old recent searches are cached too, which makes a big improvement.

We've added pagination for search results, and made some other small changes.

Thanks for the feedback/advice.

If anyone can think of good, free, places to advertise Bigulo please let us know. So far boards has been really good for hits, but I am running out of ideas.

Cheers,
Des

Well searches are now averaging under 1 second. Went with the same search indexing as phpbb (cringe!). Also every time you do a search you get a list of other possible searches and an estimated number of results that will be returned. We use soundex to find similar words, so if someone searches for castleknoc they will also see the correct spelling of castleknock (439). Its really hit or miss, but it does go someway to helping people who spell things wrong. Was thinking about using double-metaphone, anyone ever used it?

OFDM

Sorry from dragging up an old(ish) thread, but if Bebo were to send a Cease & Desist letter to bigulo.com, in the same way that MySpace did with singlestat.us and datinganyone.com, what's to stop bigulo saying bugger off, US law has no jurisdiction here, in much the same way that Swedish "pirate bay" website does with torrents?

destraynor

Hi OFDM,

Interesting question, and one I hope never to learn the answer to

If we get a C&D, we'll let you guys know about it, but tbh I can't see Bebo having too much of a problem with it. Undoubtedly they'll be annoyed, but ultimately we're just sending their own customers right back to them, so it shouldn't hurt them too much. Besides we're not exactly raking it in, revenue wise

verbatim

We've added in a popularity system to Bigulo. We've looked at 3 million bebo profiles at this stage, so we counted how often people appeared in other peoples list of Top 16 friends. This was then used to decide how popular someone is. We used the number of Top 16 friends a person has because people usually put people they like the most in their Top 16.

Everyone then gets 0-5 stars under their details when they appear in a search. This is far more accurate than the total number of views or the total number of friends a person has.

For the more technical amoung you, we count the number of inbound links to a profile, and use that to generate a ranking, similar to Googles page rank.

verbatim

We've just added a hotornot rating system for bigulo. Your given 2 photos and have to click on the one thats hotter.

babes.bigulo.com (to rate girls)

hunks.bigulo.com (to rate guys)

Theres also a list of the hottest people. Some really good looking girls on it so far!

destraynor

Just a quick note to say thanks to everyone for their support of Bigulo.
On Tuesday we passed the 1,000,000 mark for searches performed, and we seem to keep getting bigger and bigger.
You can have a quick look at our stats here:
Picture of Bigulo Stats

These days we're getting about 7,000 visitors a day and we perform about 110,000 searches per week, which is bigger than we'd ever imagined.


So in short, cheers.
If we get bought up, the next boards beers can be on us
--
Des

Mr. Flibble

destraynor wrote: »

If we get bought up, the next boards beers can be on us
Des

Where's the next boards beers?
Congrats.