New website

[Dallan Quass]

I'm launching a new website at RootsTech this week: www.gengophers.com.  It allows people to search 40,000 genealogy books (growing to 100K+ over the next several months).  A few things that are interesting about it:

* I'm using Google Consumer Surveys to monetize it. (I'll likely add ads as well, but I'm starting with surveys). I didn't know about the surveys until recently. A survey sits on top of your content and the user has to answer the survey in order to remove the survey and see the content. Once they answer a survey, they're not shown another survey for a day or a week (you control this). The interesting part is you make a nickel each time someone answers a survey. This is a lot more than what I'd expect to get from just showing ads. I think it could open up a way to put a lot more genealogy records online without subscription fees.

* I decided to use Google Cloud instead of AWS for this site. I've been using AWS for 8 years at WeRelate now and I wanted to try something different. Lesson learned: don't try something different when you are under a deadline, even if that deadline seems a long way away initially. Along the way I've developed some definite opinions about the best way to use Google Cloud and things to stay away from. I'm happy to express those opinions if people are interested.

* Google cloud allows you to attach the same disk in read-only mode to multiple servers. This simplifies auto-scaling read-only databases and search indices.

* The back-end is written in the Go language. Go is not quite mature yet (no dependency management for example), but it's an interesting language. It's the antithesis of Scala :-) -- typed but very simple. It's my second-favorite language now after Javascript. I'm not sure if I had to do it over again if I would have gone with Go or Node.js for the backend -- it's a toss-up for me.

* Docker.io is awesome. I can't imagine life without it now.

* The front-end is written as an almost-single-page application in AngularJS. Because I'm using google consumer surveys, I had to split up my front-end app so the survey pages are actually being served as separate web pages.  The survey code issues document.write statements, which require the document to not be fully loaded yet, so they don't work well in single-page applications :-(

[Justin York]

I'd be interested in your opinions about Google Cloud, in a different thread.

What's the source of the books?

Searching on the surname "jurkiewicz" gives a 500 error.

In the tooltip for "date / place", the word "ranged" should probably be "ranked".

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[Enno Borgsteede]

Dallan,

I'm launching a new website at RootsTech this week: www.gengophers.com.  It allows people to search 40,000 genealogy books (growing to 100K+ over the next several months).  A few things that are interesting about it:

* I'm using Google Consumer Surveys to monetize it. (I'll likely add ads as well, but I'm starting with surveys). I didn't know about the surveys until recently. A survey sits on top of your content and the user has to answer the survey in order to remove the survey and see the content. Once they answer a survey, they're not shown another survey for a day or a week (you control this). The interesting part is you make a nickel each time someone answers a survey. This is a lot more than what I'd expect to get from just showing ads. I think it could open up a way to put a lot more genealogy records online without subscription fees.

Very nice. I really like the clean screen with embedded scans of the results. I found a few hick-ups, but like you say, it's a beta, so I won't complain until you ask for feedback.

I noticed that Adblock Plus blocks the surveys, but I just switched that off to get you that nickel. :-)

regards,

Enno

[todd.d....@gmail.com]

Looks promising Dallan! Although, I can't get any results to return on my queries, including on "John Smith":

Thoughts?

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Tod Robbins

Digital Asset Manager, MLIS

todrobbins.com | @todrobbins

[Wayne Pearson]

I've gotten no responses on a variety of names I've tried, as well (Pearson, Smith, Jones, Jackson). 

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[todd.d....@gmail.com]

It's working now! I'm digging this Dallan. So it looks like you mainly sourced these from FamilySearch and Archive.org. Very neat.

–Tod

[Wayne Pearson]

Working now for me, too.

I've yet to see any real difference when putting in the Country; I'm getting records from the USA when putting in Canada. Perhaps "Canada" appears in the text?

Pretty slick, though! I like the embedded reader.

[Colin Spencer]

Looking good but for me it is not filtering by country. I specified England but after 5 pages of only US results I didn't look any further. Very interesting and new concept. I hope it continues to evolve and make you some $'s.

[Dallan Quass]

It's been a busy week between bugs and launch gremlins and the byu family history technology workshop yesterday. I'll post about my experience with Google after rootstech is over.

The books are from FamilySearch. As far as I can tell, they are all out of copyright works. You can search them on Familysearch.org by selecting books from the search menu. It's not a very good experience though.

Thanks for the pointer on the 500 error and ranged. Looks like I have another coding session tonight :)

[Dallan Quass]

Yeah - the solr server that was working fine the night before stopped responding to external requests yesterday morning for some reason. I was at the byu conference and didn't notice it for awhile (I've got to get monitoring and alerts set up) but was able to ssh into the server and restart the docker container and it started working. It's pretty odd that it stopped responding to external requests but it responded to local host requests when I ssh'd into the machine. I need to watch that.

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[Dallan Quass]

More on the source: Familysearch has apparently been digitizing out of copyright library books for several years. They have a number of missionaries in the Allen county public library who are also working with people from archive.org, which is very cool! They have 8+ scanners running  there, plus additional scanners in other locations. 

They are willing to make their scans of the books available to partners.  Some of the books (I don't know how many) are only available at Familysearch and not on archive.org. I think I'm the first person that has struck a deal with them, but I'm sure others will follow. I'm going to try to provide a better, free search experience.

On Tuesday, February 10, 2015, todd.d....@gmail.com <todd.d....@gmail.com> wrote: