Discover or Analyze, what’s a block explorer about?
Testing Out the Future of Avascan With the New Search Results Page
What’s a search engine?
When you think about it, a search engine is a tool you use when you want to look for something but you don’t know all about it. You want the search engine to complete your thoughts because you need to discover something you just have a few inputs of.
At ETHDenver, we talked with a lot of projects (L1s and L2s mostly), but also a lot of competitor explorers, and we finally realized what Avascan needs to be about.
Avascan is such a powerful tool as we’re building it, that you don’t just search for things. You can research things. And the difference is that when you search for something, you know what you’re looking for, while when you research you don’t.
When you research, you have some thoughts that you input, and then you look for a lot of things: relations between objects, patterns and abstractions.
You make benchmarks, you open multiple pages and stick one to each other. You don’t know what you’re looking for, but you’re looking for an answer. Just a different type of answer.
An example: Avascan is built in a way that it will soon (when Avalanche Warp Messaging is live on production subnets) let users trace coin movements across subnets seamlessly. Search users don’t need this for 95% of the use cases, but analysts need this to understand how money is moving and what it means for the token price, the tokenomics or the user traffic.
And we can do this vs. Etherscan because our indexing architecture is built to store and display unlimited history for all data points, as we announced a few weeks ago.
See, it can be summarized this way: a search engine is about discoverability, a research engine is about analyses.
A search engine needs to be so user-friendly that it needs to compromise on features vs. simpler UX. A research engine needs to have good UX but a lot of features.
We’re gonna test this from now on: we’re going to ship features more analysis-oriented, DeFi-oriented and see how and if they stick.
We’re starting with a completely revamped Search page.
Now, the Search action can be both about discovery and analysis. With the upgrade we released a few months ago, it’s easy to just discover something you have a few inputs of (Search), while with today update you can analyze everything that’s related to a certain keyword.
Let’s make an example: let’s say you want to look for ‘USDC’ on Avalanche. If you input that in the search bar, you’ll get a pre-compiled list of results right away, and you can choose which one is the one you were looking for (maybe to add it to your Metamask wallet or to look for its local supply on an Avalanche blockchain). This is a discovery.
But if you just ignore the pre-compiled dropdown list and click enter, you can look through all the USDC-related coins, NFTs, addresses and even validators that have the keyword init.
OK, maybe you don’t need to look for your validators (but some do, if they don’t remember the complete NodeID), but you need to understand what is USDC on Avalanche. Maybe there are USDC positions on Benqi or Aave, or USDC bridged from C-Chain to some subnets, or other types of USDC, like USDC.e.
You can make comparisons, find patterns (like: how many contracts use USDC? And how many of those are vault positions, how many are lending positions, etc.?).
This is an analysis.
So, we’re called the Google of Avalanche because we help users search anything on Avalanche, but what is the next step? Is being the Google of Avalanche enough for everyone? Maybe not. What has a bigger potential than a search engine to classify all the knowledge? We think that’s an encyclopedia. A Wikipedia.
Avascan, the Encyclopedia of Avalanche, the Wikipedia of Avalanche.
This is our next step.
