Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 236 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#101

Post by koheripbal »

wyck wrote: post #95

Google search is so sad these days, all results are media conglomerates, it's completely counter to the core reason why the internet existed. I really hope by catering to these mega corps that they are completely undermining their brand and someone else comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath them. If anyone noticed during the first couple days of covid, google search was free from large media results, the…

I find the only way to get useful results from google is to use the "site:xyz.com" or "related:" options.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#102

Post by texasbigdata »

fermienrico wrote: post #97
wyck wrote: post #95

Google search is so sad these days, all results are media conglomerates, it's completely counter to the core reason why the internet existed. I really hope by catering to these mega corps that they are completely undermining their brand and someone else comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath them. If anyone noticed during the first couple days of covid, google search was free from large media results, the…

I think we are gonna see aversion from going public. Companies like Stripe and SpaceX are gonna stay private for a long time. When SEC laws, shareholder interest, quarterly performance and stock volatility comes into play, corporations become this mindless soulless monster that will devour everything in its way and fuck consumers in every which way. Democratization of funds from central authority to public creates di…

It's not, I would argue, those things.

It is, potentially, the compensation plans. If you go to the proxy document and look at how comp plans are set, they usually hire a consultant, and "best practices" drivers are cash + big bonus based on typically some TSR (total shareholder return metric).

So for google, "don't be evil" is what's written down, but for the top execs "sell ads" is what gets they paid out before they retire. And those senior level "lifers" are what 40 now?

Don't really have proof to support these claims though.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#103

Post by pkamb »

I'd love a search engine that mainly searched Stack Exchange, (old.)Reddit, and some subset of blogs or single-author websites.

Especially removing Quora, Pinterest, and aggregation/reposting/SEO/affiliate blogs.

And all "product" images with a white background. Only show real photographs.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#104

Post by chrischen »

wyck wrote: post #95

Google search is so sad these days, all results are media conglomerates, it's completely counter to the core reason why the internet existed. I really hope by catering to these mega corps that they are completely undermining their brand and someone else comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath them. If anyone noticed during the first couple days of covid, google search was free from large media results, the…

It’s a hard problem because the lower down the pyramid you go the more content spam there is.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#105

Post by bmwracer »

saadalem wrote: post #61

Ok here is an additional idea for fun : A search engine that shows only urls that are not indexed b google / another one that gives you the websites with lower pagerank

Not sure it would yield any useful results, but have been thinking about a no-index search engine for a while to help find obscure or otherwise hidden information. If one exists or you build one let me know.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#106

Post by mmsimanga »

When researching a topic I have had great success searching HN and reading through the comments. If I want to find alternative software tools for a tool I am using the comments on HN are best. Searching through subreddits also yields better results than Google.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#107

Post by amelius »

COVIDisntCORONA wrote: post #70
docbrown wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[retracted] and I hope this is just a misunderstanding. As the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, 2019-nCoV is a novel (new) coronavirus.[0] The CDC defines coronavirus as a virus that was not previously known — check the FAQ, “what is a novel coronavirus?”[0.5] They changed the name of this coronavirus to reflect the disease more accurately to COVID-19.[1] The CDC has a list of other coronavirus’…

Excuse the incivility, but no. COVID-19: disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV SARS-CoV: severe accute respiratory syndrome coronavirus Coronavirus: virus that causes respiratory diseases in mammals, such as SARS (SARS-CoV) MERS (MERS-CoV), and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

Kind of strange that the name of the virus contains the symptoms of the disease (SARS = severe accute respiratory syndrome) while the disease doesn't.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#108

Post by dredmorbius »

pkamb wrote: post #103

I'd love a search engine that mainly searched Stack Exchange, (old.)Reddit, and some subset of blogs or single-author websites. Especially removing Quora, Pinterest, and aggregation/reposting/SEO/affiliate blogs. And all "product" images with a white background. Only show real photographs.

Setting specific site restrictions (only one applies at a time, e.g., "site:example.com"), or utilising DDG bang search, gets close.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#109

Post by dredmorbius »

freefriedrice wrote: post #87

Why exclude the biggest websites? The problem I see on DDG & Google is having to scroll 5-10 pages of utter SEO nonsense. "Do you have a question about ____? Many ask about _______. ____ is a common question, here the are we some answer. [sic]". Just utter garbage pages. It used to be just with recipes or medical questions, but now it feels like most everything that is a general query.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243

Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?

#110

Post by 1f60c »

sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote: post #73

I personally use Google Chrome with the duckduckgo search engine. Duckduckgo is not perfect, very in depth searches (such as gameboy advance memory layout only return junk, while google knows you are searching for a nich) but on your average search it is as good as google, somethimes better because it is more factual and will promote less webstores. When it does not give me what im looking for I can add !g anywhere i…

> I can add !g anywhere in the question

I knew about !bangs, but I didn't know you could put them anywhere in the query (e.g. "hello !g world" searches Google for "hello world"). This is going to save me a lot of time on mobile. Thanks!

Post reply on HN