Building My Own Little Search Thing
So, I got this idea, right? I needed to find very specific stuff online, not just general web results. Think like, old knitting patterns or maybe schematics for vintage radios. The big search engines just weren’t cutting it, mixing in loads of junk I didn’t want.
First thing I did was figure out where to even get the information. This was the hard part. I couldn’t just scrape the whole web. So, I started small. I picked a niche I knew something about – let’s say, obscure cooking gadgets.
Getting the Data Together
I spent a good few weekends just manually gathering links and descriptions. Found some forums, old blogs, manufacturer sites that still had pages up for discontinued stuff. It was slow work. I tried setting up some basic web scrapers using some Python scripts I found, but honestly, they broke all the time. Websites change, layouts shift. It was more trouble than it was worth for this small project.
- Manually listed sources I trusted.
- Copied descriptions and keywords for each gadget.
- Tried scraping a few sites, mostly failed, gave up on that for now.
- Ended up with a messy spreadsheet, basically.
Making it Searchable
Okay, spreadsheet wasn’t gonna work as a search engine. I needed something better. I decided to set up a really simple database. Nothing fancy, just something to hold the gadget name, description, keywords, and the source link (just for my reference, not for clicking in the tool itself).
Then came the search part. How would it actually find things? I didn’t need anything complex like Google. I just wrote a basic script. It looked something like this:
- Take the words someone types into the search box.
- Check if those words appear in the gadget name.
- Check if they appear in the description.
- Check if they match any keywords I added.
- Show the results that have the most matches.
Super simple. No ranking algorithms, no AI, none of that jazz. Just basic text matching.
Putting Up a Front
Finally, I needed a way to actually use it. So I put together a very, very basic webpage. Literally just an HTML file. It had:
- A title saying what it was (My Gadget Finder, or something).
- A search box.
- A button that said “Search”.
- An area below where the results would show up.
I hooked up my search script to this page. When you hit “Search”, it runs the script against the database and spits the results back onto the page. Plain text, nothing pretty.
How it Ended Up
And… that was pretty much it. It works, sort of. It finds the gadgets I manually put into the database. It’s fast because the database is tiny. It’s definitely a “speciality” search engine because it only knows about the stuff I told it about.
Is it amazing? No. Is it useful for that one specific niche I focused on? Yeah, actually. Saves me wading through tons of irrelevant shopping results on the big search sites when I’m looking for that weird, specific kitchen tool. It was a fun little project, learned a bit, and got a tool that kinda solves my original problem, even if it’s rough around the edges.
