README

RankNStein is a simple web application that allows you to find 
out where your website (or any url for that matter) ranks on search
engines when people search for a given phrase or set of keywords.

RankNStein began as an itch for me to scratch -- in two ways. First,
I really wanted to learn how to build a soup-to-nuts Sinatra application.
From creating stories in Pivotal Tracker, to writing Cucumber user stories,
to the implementation, to deployment.

Second, though the service provided by RankNStein seems very basic -- that is,
it provides an automated means of handling a manual task -- I was amazed
that I was not able to find a similar capability on the web. All the solutions
I found were usually driven by commercial entities in the SEO space.

The initial implementation of RankNStein will provide a very simple interface
that looks something like the following:

       +-------------------------------------------------------------+
       |                                                             |
       |        When I search for: ________________________________  |
       |                      in Google ...                          |
       |            My webpage at: ________________________________  |
       |                                                             |
       |                       +------------+                        |
       |                       |  Ranks ... |                        |
       |                       +------------+                        |
       |                                                             |
       |                             15                              |
       +-------------------------------------------------------------+
       
My ideas after implementing this initial solution include 
  (in quasi-chronological order):

 - FAQ
 - Display of result detail in unobtrusive div
 - A restful API for service integration
 - Ability to search multiple search engines
 - Spam prevention? (Do I need/want to prohibit pr0n sites?)
 - Cookie-backed saved searches (inherently constrained)
 - Database-backed saved searches (major architectural shift)
 - Trending (i.e. saved searches with history)
 - Visualization (depends on trending)
 - RSS Feeds
 
=============================
Gem Dependencies
-----------------------------
sinatra
haml
bsiggelkow-ruby-web-search (this is my fork of ruby-web-search)