Topic: Coinosphere.com - The Google of Bitcoin (Read 2475 times)

Speed over Quality, does it ever work when the Price is free?

Are you volunteering for the job?

Try to look at this from a business perspective here. We are spending all our time cleaning large lists of indexed websites down to a few that pass incrementally stricter tests until we have something that looks decent enough to take the time to categorize & publish. I've got over 4,000 such results now, but I suspect that there are about 50,000 merchants out there taking bitcoin in total so far. (Of course that number grows daily too.)

We need to get Faster, not much slower at this if we're ever going to get anywhere near letting the world see all of the bitcoin-accepting merchants in one place.

There is already a link on each listing that lets the public report a scammer, and of course comments on the page too where I've already had two people point out scammers and I've removed them by hand.

Crowdsourcing scam-spotting is the only option I have open to me, at least while I'm not profitable yet. Unless some expert at analysis steps up to volunteer his or her time, such a position is simply going to have to wait until I far surpass being profitable and actually can afford a medium-sized business staff.

I'm all ears to your constructive criticsm, but what would really help right now is what I could do in the realm of crowdsourcing the scam-spotting. What could I provide on my site that would make hunting down these bastards fun or at least easy enough that everyone would be happy to do it?

::headdesk::

THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR INTELLIGENT ANALYSIS.

Not "looking to see if they have graphics". Not "some random schmoe says so". Not "I feel like it". Not "I'm wearing yellow shoes today."

Not anything, not now, not ever. Regardless of how many people have tried to make a replacement before (are you even the least bit aware of how many wannabe scammer lists comprised of public voting buttons are out there?). Regardless of how good your intentions are.

Game on!

As of today, Feb 27th, Coinosphere Beta is officially launched with almost 4,000 Bitcoin-accepting merchants and charities!

I do believe that makes us the largest listing of bitcoin merchants online already, but if someone knows of a larger listing please let me know.

Some of the people in this thread have inspired my next addition to Coinosphere: The ultimate bitcoin scammers list... With public voting for the biggest scammers. (Here's hoping Gox doesn't just sit at the top of that list forever. )

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks BTCLuke, it is actually working now, don't know why I was seeing the old page before.
I'll pass the word along to my bitcoin-enabled friends!

Hi XFox, the site has been live since Jan 28th, please try refreshing your browser.

Unfortunately, we did not meet our goals for the Bitcoinstarter campaign (We only got to 40%, and you need to raise 100% to receive any of it) and therefore have fallen short on the funding we need to launch Coinosphere as originally intended.

But I'm not deterred! My solution was to open up in "Beta" status, with fewer listings and no marketing yet, to work any remaining bugs out while we get our listings in the directory slowly but surely. My search engine is popping out hundreds of new Bitcoin-accepting merchant sites every single night, but there is just no way to get them cleaned, sorted, categorized and loaded into the Coinosphere directory fast enough.

As you can see there are 2,500+ listings at this time, but before I take it out of beta status I would like to see over 10,000 listings there, and it's a matter of improving my automation processes now in order to deliver this.

What's the state of this project?
According to BTCLuke, site should already be online now.
Moreover, as of today it is still showing "This site will not be revealed until January 28th 2014."…

Hi Lamalicious and successquik,

Thanks for your kind words.

Yes, I am opening the doors to Coinosphere.com rain or shine on Tuesday, even though that means we won't have many results filtered and readily displayed yet. The site will officially be launched as a "beta" site, because some things will be slower and with less functionality too... But just a little bit. The main problem will be the lack of all those juicy listings that Sauron has indexed already.

As for the Bitcoinstarter campaign, I have opted to push back the ending date a week so that it ends after you guys have access to Coinosphere.com and can see the promise of it for yourself, first-hand, before making a pledge on Bitcoinstarter.com.

Thanks for your patience everyone! See you tomorrow afternoon on Coinosphere.com!

Wow!  I haven't been on the forum for awhile and was pleased to see that my simple question about filtering scams generated such response. 

Glad to see it being discussed as it's so very sad to see that so many people seeking to earn online are so mathematically illiterate. It's really scary.

Any old site can pop up and say, "We have a unique algorithm to trade forex, it's secret, Bill Gates doesn't know" so invest with us and we'll pay you 1% a day!

And the money pours in! Sad, so very sad.

For those of you who aren't aware there are forums that specialize on ponzi schemes, think Silk Road for the the scam world, like moneymakergroup, talkgold, etc.   These sites make money selling advertising to ponzi programs who feast on the gullibility of the financially ignorant.

And, with rise of bitcoin you'll see more and more of these scams using bitcoin. 

I don't know what the answer is, other than education (ugh, good luck with THAT) and the hope that those that control the power (search engines, advertisers, etc.) have the gumption and expertise to weed that crap out.

You can't legislate morality but you can cordon off the perpetrators of fraud (in my idyllic world anyway, LOL)

Best of luck to you BTCluke, your project is fascinating and I'll be watching with keen interest!

SQ

 

what is going to happen if you won't reach 4 btc ? Are still going to launch a project ? :O

Thanks XFox! It's appreciated.

One week to go and the remaining problems are starting to clear up... I just don't know with how many listings yet.

The indexing crawler count is over 131,000 bitcoin-accepting domains now, but again, there's a lot of questionable sites in there that needs to be manually reviewed so I'm hoping to just have between 10k & 20k listings showing on launch day.


As for scam warnings, I'm more than open to working with any provider that has a service to spot and list bitcoin scams.

If they have a list of Verified scam sites that I could simply feed that into my database, I could rip those out of my listings automatically. If they offered a service for doing so, I would even be willing to share data with them. This would be a great little business model for someone like MPOE-PR if they were feeling entrepreneurial.

I've just pledged, thank you for this great project!

good to see you are addressing technical difficulties before launch!

Due to unforseen technical difficulties the launch of Coinosphere will not occur tomorrow as originally planned. I apologize for getting everyone's hopes up for a launch so soon.

New Launch date set for January 28th, a 2-week delay while we work on some site problems.

The good news is that more features will be available on Coinosphere by launchtime, so hang on tight and we're sure to overdeliver!

Listen. As the operator of a directory, you can either 1. purport to disallow scams, or 2. not. If you do 1, you must necessarily understand what makes something a scam, and how this can be determined. No matter how quickly you do it. No matter how much better or worse some other group is at it. No matter anything else.

If you do it anyway, you are creating a pathway through which scammy operations can paint on more appearances of validity, however small that might be, and however much it might be limited in its effects to the new and uninformed. That sucks.

Do you understand? If you don't know how to do something and you're not interested in learning how to do it, for fuck's sake don't say you're doing it. To any degree. At all.

Perhaps I should reiterate that I'm not starting a review blog here; nor was I in any way trying to suggest that me and my employees are qualified to scan (in 5-10 seconds per site) to see if a site is a scam or not... With as many as a thousand new sites pouring in every hour to be checked, all I can offer as a scan against scams is the very basic most level of a look-over... But I assure you every site will be seen by human eyes.

I hope you'll be happy with this service since it is far and away much more than google does to protect you against scams showing up in their listings.

There wasn't anything to "clear up" other than your demonstrated lack of understanding as to what constitutes a scam and how it can be identified. This is a problem for you to resolve, or not, but you'll have to do one or the other. Suggesting you're qualified to do it sometimes or whatever (despite being very confused about how to "spot") and pointing to how other people fail at it isn't in any way a solution.

Thanks for your concern, however keep in mind that Coinosphere is primarily a search engine, like google. Google does not attempt to screen out such stuff, as that would require paying for a million or so knowledgable people to read every new page on the web 24/7.

There is no way anyone can afford to spend enough time on each site to look at such factors; but I can proudly say we screen a heck of a lot more than google does because our market is still small and I want to categorize them all for fun browsing.

I'd say that we spend between 5-10 seconds on each bitcoin-verified site on average now, so in that time, if we can spot a spammy/scammy site from the front page, we'll remove it.

...And of course if the site is reported by users, which is simple to do from the "Report listing" link beside every listings' page.

Hope this clears a few things up! Thanks again for your input.
 

You miss the point. If "artwork" is a problem in terms of determining whether something is a scam of not, you're way, way out of your depth. Artwork has absolutely nothing to do with it. Your idea is basically that deciding whether a piece of fruit is ripe or not hinges upon the visual quality of the price tag.

You have to understand how fruit is picked.

Maybe have a read here.

I don't know, insanity dice was pretty convincing.

Sure, I do have some automated screening going on first of course... There's a lot of junk we shouldn't even see at all, and then the remainder will be judgement calls.

...seriously?

Thanks guys!

I appreciate the kind words and I'm working as fast as I can right now to cram all the merchants Sauron found into the directory for launch day... It's not a trivial number. 

Really nice design, I like it.  Clean & concise, just what's needed for a successful operation.

All the best, and keep us updated on the launch!

Looking slick Luke! Keep up the good work! 

Hi SQ,

For adult (pr0n) sites, I've decided to keep the listings out, for family accessibility (& SEO) reasons, but I'm still collecting them for a secondary directory/search engine to be launched later this year. Adult toy stores in particular have a very strong use for bitcoin and I hope to give that industry just as good of an offering one day soon.

For the ponzis and scams, we'll do our best to spot and weed them out at the manual level. Although sometimes it can be tough to spot them if they have good marketing & artwork, but even if they make it to a final listing on our site, there is a "report this listing" link beside every single listing that lets the public send it back to us for further review.

Thanks for the questions!

Luke:

Are you going to filter out or at least separate porn sites and ponzi scam sites from the listings?

No comment on the porn (just curious) but would hate to see you contribute to the proliferation of bitcoin ponzi schemes that are popping up all over the place.

Just saying....   

SQ

looking great!

Update time!

I've updated the bitcoinstarter campaign to include the following images, but I knew you guys here were very proof-oriented so you were probably waiting for something like these before you responded to the first post... Oh well, better late than never...

Here's a shot of the Eye of Sauron, after indexing one of the subforums here on bitcointalk:



That number is up to 63,876 merchants now by the way, although there are lots of bad listings in there that need to be discarded, such as news articles, splogs, and .onion sites. (I don't discard the pr0n sites, those get saved for a future project. )

Here's a shot of the front page of Coinosphere.com as it stands now:



I'm moving around banner locations often though, it'll probably look a lot smoother by Launch day on the 14th. Note the suggest functionality on the search bar: It's very smooth to search on there when you're in a hurry.

Finally, here's how the new listings page looks, zoomed in for better resolution:



I haven't even gone into all the other fun stuff on the site like the awesome Bitcoin events calendar, the big Map, all the different things you can add to your listings like videos & twitter feeds, nor the great news & FAQs pages. Too much to talk about before launch... But I do answer a lot of questions on the bitcoinstarter campaign page.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have here too.

Hope you guys love it!
-Luke

Coinosphere.com will completely solve the age-old problem of "where can I spend my BTC?"

Let's face it, BTC always seems to be a pipe dream to newcomers because they can't see it as a spendable money yet when it's not accepted nearby them... And they are not going to bother search very hard to do so.

But listing merchants & service providers in one place, like the BTC Wiki or Coinmap has proven to be a real challenge... These wikis and blogs all rely on the merchants to come to those websites to list themselves... And so far only a very small percentage of BTC-accepting merchants are doing so. (And yes I can state this for a fact.)

Bitpay says they now service 15,500+ vendors.
Coinbase says they service 16,000+ vendors.
Blockchain services thousands as well.
Heck, you can service your own damn merchant needs; just by placing a BTC address on your page...

So there are literally somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 merchants out there accepting bitcoin right now! Some are sure to be near you, but are not listed on a map anywhere. For now, they might as well have set up shop on the moon.

So I have created Coinosphere with the intention of getting proactive about finding all these merchants. We can't just sit here any longer and have every mom & pop shop come to us... We must go to them! All services that serve the industry will be found too. -And then I'll list these sites in my directory for the world to see in a sort-able, searchable format!  

This thread will serve as the official Coinosphere thread, so feel free to ask any questions you'd like answers to below. I don't bite. However first, please check out the Bitcoinstarter.com crowdfunding campaign for Coinosphere, where I've answered a lot of questions already:

http://bitcoinstarter.com/projects/391

It's not asking for much BTC; I've already finished coding the "Eye of Sauron" engine that finds these sites for me... But displaying them in a searchable frontend is what I need some more funding for... Only enough to pay for some directory coding and the artwork for Coinosphere.com, so on January 14th I can Launch on schedule.

However, if we make it up into the stretch goals the real magic happens... I think you're really going to like what you read there!

So please, ask any questions you have for me below, check out the campaign and say hi, check out the cool prizes there, tell all your BTC-loving friends about it, and maybe even stop by the Coinosphere facebook page too if you have a chance.

Hope you like it!
Luke
Coinosphere.com