AVC community member Kevin Marshall is the consummate hacker. I can’t count all the stuff Kevin has hacked on since I’ve known of him over the years. And I’ve tried many of them.
A few weeks ago, Kevin emailed me with his latest, gawk.it. Kevin described it this way:
I just hacked together the start of a simple system I wanted to
tell you about. The idea is a system to let you search conversations
from around the web.
So far I started with just the AVC comment board, and it’s
super basic right now (going to improve it over the next few days) but
should already be functional (and useful for those of us interested in
the avc community).
Being able to search the AVC comments is probably the single most common request I get when we talk about the comments here. So I knew right away that Kevin was working on something where there was a real pain point.
But I wanted more than comment search. I replied back to Kevin:
What would be great is an integrated blog and comments search
Could you build that?
In classic hacker behavior, Kevin replied that he could and less than a day later, we had integrated blog and comment search. We then iterated on the UI/UX a bit and by this weekend, less than seven days after his initial email, gawk.it was live on AVC. It is live on GothamGal.com as well.
It’s been running in the AVC search field on the upper right of this blog for a few days now. I know that a few folks have noticed it, but I want everyone to check it out.
I think the blog search part (which is the default result) works really well. I think the comment search (in the tab to the left) works OK but is getting better every day.
Give it a spin and let Kevin and me know what you think in the comments.
