Great concept, this is an idea that has been lacking in most search engines. Wish I would have had this at high school and university.

Site look and feel needs to be cleaned up! Still looks like a prototype instead of a world class site. Clean, simple and elegant is the key. The apple methodology of doing things would help. You never get a chance to make a second first impression! Please work on the colours.

On the bottom of the page, instead of displaying all the recent, top 10 searches, why don’t you have a break down similar to how Youtube to see recent videos. Allow people to see results by what they want to see. Looks like you are trying to fill the page.

Would be neat to break down search results by .com, .gov, .org….

By the way, typed in “Assista” and got no results back…..

Best of luck Sahar with Assista…. This is an idea worth working for.

Greg

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Encouraging feedback Greg, thanks!

Sahar

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Great feedback Shane, will work on it, should be fixed by tomorrow. As far as release, we’ve been working on it for more then three years now, wanted to get it out and running. Our main issues were speed, scalability. We feel we have dealt with our immediate need and from here on will improve. The feedback so far, including yours, has been extremely helpful.
Cheers
Sahar

I think redirecting some domains is a very wise decision.
I think you could even send the visitors to a query that is relevant to the domain he just entered.

It is a lot of work but,
let’s say John types in wine.com (and let’s suppose you own wine.com), instead of being redirected to the assista homepage, redirect him to a page with questions about wine.

I am not sure if this would work for all your domains, but I think it is more relevant, and you could use this feature (if you don’t use it already) at least for the highly descriptive domains.

Congrats on Assista,

Alex

PS: I tend to type in asista (because this is a valid word in romanian). I don’t think asista.com is yours ….

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Hi Alex, and thanks for feedback. Yes, we will do it with some domains, some will send to homepage. As for Asista.com it isn’t ours, maybe one day. I do have another related domain in mind I want but will cost me seven figures. Maybe later the year, we shall see.

Cheers

Sahar

1. after registering, don’t redisplay the registration fields… it’s confusing. just show the result message in the middle of the page.
2. i’d like to see 100 results at a time, maybe you could allow the user to choose between 10, 25, 50 and 100.

Happy new year!!

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Hi Eric, and thanks!
1. We will work on registration usability. I think we have allot of work there.
2. We had this before when testing and may put it back up if users demand it. Somthing to think about.
Cheers
Sahar

Interesting project. Will be interested to see how you integrate NLP into it.

One suggestion, with questions mostly beginning with the 5 Ws, who,what,where,why,when and how, I noticed that while using assista that most questions were preceeded with “what”. To me that offers an uneven set of Q’s to look at. I beleive offering a more balanced set of Q’s that include who,where,why,when and how will give the user a better experience and better data to assista.

Happy new Year!!

Cheers!

Chris

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Thanks Chris, and agree. This is all algo issues and will work to improve these issues as we go along.
Thanks again for the great feedback!
Sahar

Firstly, congrats on such an ambitious project!
I did a few searches with Assista and over 50% of the links I clicked were dead. Maybe your system could automatically filter out dead links?

JP

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Thanks JP.. We’re aware of some issues with current DB, plan to work intensively on it next six months to make it flawless.
Cheers
Sahar

I know you are super excited about Assista, and your readers like me are very interested in folloiwng (and participating) in it’s evolution. We look foward to continued postings on it. However, I would recommend you continuine blogging on non-Assista things like you have in the past. One of the things I like about your blog and others like SevenMile is the great sharing of ideas, advice and links to other articles of interest. That’s what keeps me coming back.

Best wishes for an awsome 2008!

RM

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You’re absolutely right about my excitement, I’ve been waiting over three years for it to go live.

I will blog about other things as well, other businesses, other concepts, experiences, lessons, etc., however, my blog was never meant to be a “domain only blog” and that I will leave for others to concentrate on.

Cheers

Sahar