I ran the analog Nigma

bring to your attention the result of six years of experiments — the search engine "Butty"

So was to begin a post with a PR of my engine 2 years ago.
A post was already written and ready to publish, but did not work :)
Under the cut are waiting for you lyric story of the creation and attempts to promote.

Birth

the Idea of creating this search engine came into my head in the day of my age.
On the same day (2007.08.19) had registered the domain in the zone .EN
The establishment of symbiosis search engines at that time already was not new, for example, the search engine Nigma held 0.4% of Russian-speaking search.

I called Google and said, whether they admit the combination of issue. The answer was positive.
So, for a few months a friend the programmer had written code for a little money.
For little money I got unoptimized code, as expected.

Further, during the year, we advertise our search engine forums, web-masters, to listen to the opinions of those who know.

We have three times rewrote the parsing algorithm. Made quick work of.
Caching was also present.
Yandex has officially parcels, XML, and Google unofficially :)
At first search engines was all three — including the Rambler, but I quickly abandoned it.

We took a dedicated server in Moscow. Added weather, search YouTube with the jump function and search of images (coarse parsing Yandex with opening the images directly, without intermediate transitions).

Developed a portal (a La Yandex). Of course, with their chips.

We put Direct on Ya page and Yandex allowed us to do up to 10,000 XML requests per day.

But in January 2009, the chief programmer went into a long binge, and Yandex has blocked us access to XML because we are not designated in the search — where the results and their. That's all.
For the month of downtime was no enthusiasm for it.

Nothing big we couldn't go.
Although... we are at the peak had more than 500 regular users :)
I used the search, he stood in my default browser.
To compete with the giants and had no idea.

what was the plan?

the Most important argument was that Butty combines the two best search engines into one.
They say, why spend two times more time when there is a Butty?
Well, unlike the same Nigmi, we have no replays.

Cunning attempt to promote

1. Opened free hosting
In exchange for hosting users posted search string Butty
Read more about the history of hosting, you can read here.

2. SmallProxy
Agreed with the late author of the popular program SmallProxy to when installing software, Butty became the starting page.

3. Banner with the latest search query
Made a tricky banner:

He was located on sites with a large number of transitions of the SS.
Referrer is recognized on what the request is here.
Next, generate a gif with that same query in the search box :)

Clone

the project had as many as 3 (three!) clone.
They copied the design, but the parsers they had their. Worse.

Name

my head is spinning the word "butterfly" (butterfly). Next, I hammered a "butty" in the field and learned that it translates to English as "friend, buddy, comrade; companion."
Only a few months, I learned that "butt" in English translates to, I'm sorry, "ass"!
Especially became frustrating when I typed in the address bar butty.com (there is a porn site).

Evolution logo

Opinion

you May remember that I wrote several times on habré posts about their failures.
I want to say that I don't have regrets about these efforts.
Try, gentlemen. Try! :)

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru