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I mean yesterday their result page for “twitter new CEO” looked like this: https://imgur.com/a/Zyze2Bt So… yeah. The funny bit is that the actual search algo got it right. I’m with others on appending Reddit to your search.
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The hard part of what Google does is spam and abuse prevention. If you only indexed known-good sources I think the hard part would basically be done. Providing good search results, rich queries, sentiment analysis etc is all old hat by now.
"Known-good" sources have a serious habit of getting owned by malware and replaced by organized crime schemes. Anti-abuse can't be handled by whitelists, it needs to be an online system.
Yes, since a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 . > Any pro tips on how to google Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg .
Google seems to also have a heavy recency bias. I've tried to search for news articles that were even a month old and have had trouble locating links to stories I know happened. I don't know any tricks to working around this. And if I don't recall specifically when the article came out (say, somewhere around 6 months ago), I'll usually give up. Any tips on finding "historical" results?
Yes, since a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 . > Any pro tips on how to google Pro tip: try DuckDuckGo, https://ddg.gg .
ddg is bing. So why would I bother with it?
2. DDG has its own search crawler (and it's getting larger, the more people use it).
You can also try SearX.
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
What's kind of funny is there was a time where Google used to stand for --literally anything-- and would punish a site like reddit on search results for having such a user hostile interface. For some reason though (probably because they used AMP) they basically allow them to do anything they want. Multiple popups, hijacking click events for login modals, and hiding the content with no impact to search results. So now…
I like to compare with search.marginalia.nu results from time to time, but the restrictions it puts on the content it traverses do not make for a good daily driver.
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It's analogous to predatory pricing. Google has all the necessary tech to go back to doing good searches. They can easily pivot back in a few months. A new startup would need to dump loads of money into servers and building their own tech. So there's just no way to recoup the cost of building a competitor.
You might be surprised how much compute it takes. Not the same thing but, entire SO website runs on like 2 door sized racks. Search engine might be a different thing but if you have funding to get started, hardware costs aren’t going to be impossibly huge. Most is labor (engineering). I’m curious, how much compute power it takes to index the whole web? I presume queries are super fast.
Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Edit: I'd love to see a some-of-the-web search engine like this. Start just with university sites, prepress archives, quality forums, public dev Slacks, etc.
> Everytime one of these threads show up, I find myself wondering why someone doesn't launch a technical and research focused competitor. There seems to be such broad agreement that Google is now terrible for research that there's for sure a market for it. Your bubble seems to agree, but the lack of serious competition, even in niches, is a sign that outside the HN bubble Google is in fact not seen as any worse.
It feels like the algorithm (combined with the SEO/marketing industry) has effectively nuked discussions from organic results. Based on the search box suggestions I get, it seems many people work around this by appending reddit to their searches. If I search for "warmest winter coat" it's a bunch of untrustworthy content marketing until you try something like "warmest winter coat reddit" Unfortunately I prefer to avo…
This is a reply to myself... but does anyone have ideas about how this can go away? Have we lost the internet to eternal marketing and data-mining arms races? Is this why people are flocking to search-opaque places like Discord? Sometimes I feel like that internet isn't for me anymore, and that's a little distressing.
And of course, new search engine, something distributed and in the GNU domain.