How I ran an analogue of Nigma

We present to your attention the result of one and a half years of experiments - the search engine "Butty"



That's how the post should have started with the PR of my search engine 2 years ago.

The post has already been written and ready for publication, but did not work out :)

Under the cut you are waiting for a lyrical story about the creation and attempts to advance.

Origin

The idea of ​​creating this search engine came into my head right on the day of my majority.

On the same day (2007.08.19) the domain was registered in the zone .ru

Creating a symbiosis of search engines at that time was no longer a novelty, for example, the search engine Nigma occupied 0.4% of the Russian-language search.



I called Yandex and clarified whether they allow the combination of issuance. The answer was positive.

So, for several months, a code was written by a familiar programmer for little money.

For a little money, I received a non-optimized code, as it should be.

')

Further, over the course of a year, we advertised our search engine several times on the webmaster forums to listen to the opinions of those who understand this.



We rewrote the parsing algorithm three times. Have achieved fast work.

Caching is also present.

Yandex has been parsing officially, in XML, and Google - unofficially :)

At first, there were generally three search engines — including Rambler, but I quickly abandoned it.



We took a dedicated server in Moscow. Added weather, YouTube search with the download function and image search (rough parsing of Yandex with the opening of the image immediately, without intermediate transitions).



Developed a portal (a la Yandex). Naturally, with their chips.



We put Ya.Direkt on the page and Yandex allowed us to make up to 10,000 XML requests per day.



But in January 2009, the main programmer went into a long hard drinking, and Yandex blocked us access via XML for what we did not designate in the search - where their output was, and where not theirs. That's all.

For a month of inactivity lost enthusiasm.



Nothing big shone to us.

Although ... we had more than 500 regular users at the peak :)

I myself used the search engine, it was my default browser.

To create competition to giants and in thoughts was not.

What was the intention?

The most important argument was that Butty combines the two best search engines into one.

Like, why spend twice as much time when there is Butty?

Well, unlike the same Nigma, we had no repetitions.

Cunning attempts to promote

1. Opened free hosting

In exchange for hosting users posted a search string Butty

More information about the history of hosting can be read here .



2. SmallProxy

I agreed with the now deceased author of the popular SmallProxy program so that when installing his software, Butty becomes the start page.



3. Banner with the latest search query

Made a tricky banner:



It was placed on sites with a large number of transitions from the PS.

The referrer recognized the request by which the visitor came.

Then gif was generated with this very query in the search line :)

Clones

The project had 3 (three!) Clones.

They copied the design, but they had their own parsers. Worse.

Title

The word “butterfly” (butterfly) spun in my head. Next, I hammered "butty" in Lingvo and learned that it translates from English as "friend, buddy, comrade; companion".

Only a few months later I learned that “butt” is translated from English as, excuse me, “asshole”!

It became especially unpleasant when I entered butty.com in the address bar (there is a porn site there).

Logo Evolution

Conclusion

Perhaps you remember that I wrote posts on my own failures several times in Habré.

I want to say that not a bit sorry about these attempts.

They gave me such an experience, such a basis, without which now it would be very difficult for me to work.

Try, gentlemen. Try! :)