HACKER Q&A
📣 kblestarge

A way to analyze search results for software gaps in the market?


Is there a way to analyze search results, click-through rates, and maybe even bounce rates to find gaps in the market for software solutions?

For example, I’m searching for a tool that does X, but the first page of search results are tools for Y and Z. After paginating a bit, I find a tool that does X but it’s full of terrible ads and the UI is clunky and unintuitive. This is where the opportunity reveals itself. As a software developer myself, I know I can build a better tool for X and eventually out rank the ugly tool I just used.

It’s easy enough to do this based on my own search experiences, but it would be really cool if there was a way to get these insights from a large collection of user search data.

Is there a way to do this? What tools do you use for this type of market gap analysis?

  👤 edmundsauto Accepted Answer ✓
I don't know if there is a way to do this at scale - I see it more as an input into developing your own expert sense of the market. The market intel tools that I've seen can help centralize data collection for you, but IMO they really create a mental laziness that means people can look at the superficial metrics and not develop their own intuition.

Getting the data is (relatively) easy, compared to the more difficult task of interpreting it in the context of the market.