Announcing Steem Insights - Steem search engine based on Hivemind

After an official announcement of Hivemind, I became quite excited, not because I understood what is was but because I’ve seen some decent progress with infrastructure cost reduction by Steemit Inc.

At the same time, I was already working on block explorer for Steem Dapps leveraging Steemjs API but then it went down for major changes related to Steem.DAO. I was pissed at first but that gave me some time to rethink the architecture of my project. After I’ve done that, I decided I need to test Tower, a Hivemind REST API made by @emrebeyler.

To be honest, it felt quite cool to dig through the docs and testing it live. If there are two things that are missing on Steemit or any other Steem-based interfaces, that would be clearly search and filtering options.

I cannot stress enough how awesome it is to have a simple way to look through the whole blockchain with multiple queries, it’s a bless for users and a relief for users.

What is Steem Insights?

Originally, I was planning to create an explorer for Dapps only but then I decided to switch my focus towards changing the whole concept of block explorers. All of the modern explorers display data mostly for tech people but how we’re going to attract new users if we’re building products only for nerds?

Thus, I would like to call Steem Insights a Steem search engine. An engine, yes. Basically, I want to make an ability for people to search for Steem-related data and getting the results they can understand. If you take Steemdb or Steemd, you would see lots of info that tells nothing whatsoever to your mom, an artist or even a sales manager. My goal is to change this and make search process great again.

Current features

At the moment, I implemented accounts and dapps search. I deliberately made it similar to how facebook search used to work prior to removing all of the advanced filtering settings.

You can now find all of the guys and girls from your hometown, the place you’re considering moving or just curious about. You can find the influencers, the whales, the Steem old souls and even delegators of responsibilities. You can sort by multiple fields also which is by default set to descending (for some obvious reasons).

Here’s a few shots of the engine:

Search by location: Korea

Search by account name: emre

Multiple filters: 10,000+ followers, 40+ reputation, 10MV+ voting weight, 2017 – minimum account creation date.

I also decided to add basic search for Steemapps. It took me a couple of hours to implement that which was quite satisfying. Thanks @therealwolf for an awesome api, really appreciate your work. Although you do have to type the full name of the app, there's no 'contains' querying yet. I'll try to change it with autocomplete in the next update.

P.S. Forgot to mention the website, it's steeminsights.com

How to use Steem Insights?

The usage is pretty straightforward, you just type in the name of the account of the person you’re looking for or you select the filters and hit apply. In both cases you’ll see some results. By default all of the accounts are filtered by reputation which means you’ll see top quality accounts on the Steem blockchain.

Besides, even though there are over a million Steem accounts, you might find no results if you apply too many filters. You’ll see something like that:

If you stumbled upon that, you can simply click reset filters and start your new search.
There are a few things you have to be aware of due to how Hivemind queries work now:

• Main search box – currently does the search through Steem account names, not the display names that users set
• Posts – work only if you put the exact number of posts, there’s no minimum value in Tower API yet
• Proxy – has to be the exact Steem account name of the proxy, otherwise it finds nothing

What are the plans?

My nearest plans are to collect the feedback and to see which features search options do people desire.
But overall I’m planning to implement:

• Followers and following search.
• Proposals search (as soon as @blocktrades releases them on a testnet which could happen next week).
• Posts search. I'm still considering whether to add tags-based lookup or implement communities right away. In any scenario I would love to see more filters for posts to implement this one.

I also consider adding search through top Steem dapps, including @steemmonsters and @drugwars. I have a decent architecture to diplay data of virtually any rest api so dapps are definitely on the list.

For those who was looking for a link, here we are steeminsights.com

P.S. Already made the first update, added a dashboard.

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If you like what I do, make sure to vote for my witness (via steemit or steemconnect). Witnesses keep the infrastructure going so don’t skip.