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

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

#171

Post by text_exch »

I've long wanted to build a search engine of only personal blogs. I am less familiar with the field of information retrieval so I haven't gotten started yet, but it's always been a dream of mine and if anyone is interested please contact me at threemillionthflower [at] the world's largest email provider.

Discovering unknown parts and blogs on the internet is one of the enduring goals of a newsletter that I run [1], which provides a single link to an interesting article every day, usually by lesser-known authors and blogs across the internet.

[1] www.thinking-about-things.com

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

#172

Post by miek »

keenmaster wrote: post #86
bsanr2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this yesterday. It seems biased towards the interests of the curators, and, like Google in regards to "some ideal average consumer", is therefore useless if you fall outside a certain level of similarity to the target demo. For example, I enjoy weightlifting and strength sports. I did a search for "muscle", and every result but one was using the word "muscle" as a figurative metaphor. Barely anything about ac…

What if Google Advanced Search produced a visual network map which showed you the salient clusters of terms related to your search? You’d then be able to click on a cluster and the search results would change to adjust to what you’re really searching for. Ex: The network map for “weightlifting” would include many clusters, but 2 big ones would be the hypertrophic cluster (surrounded by a bunch of related terms) and t…

I like this idea a lot. Wonder if anyone is working on this.

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

#173

Post by nulbyte »

COVIDisntCORONA wrote: post #142
tacon wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we would say SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are both strains of SARSr-CoV Thank you for making my point, again.

I don't believe I did. Genera -- as in SARS-CoV-2's genus is Betacoronovirus -- don't have "strains." Only families -- such as the SARSr-CoV family -- have strains.

To GP's point, your initial reply said:

> SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

GP was pointing out that this was incorrect, and you just made that point by stating it yourself.

Assuming you are intending to engage in the conversation and not be a pedant, I might let you know that your replies are coming across quite coarsely. More specifically, as to prefaces on earlier comments, there is no need to excuse incivility, because there is no need for incivility here.

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

#174

Post by ublaze »

totemandtoken wrote: post #133

Reminds me of this classic pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Specifically this quote: "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine." There has been a lot of grumblings about the state o…

I've wondered if this can be built with a limited budget, in terms of cloud costs. At least it feels like you'd need a lot of hosts to satisfactorily index the web, and store the results so that you can return results instantaneously.

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

#175

Post by rthomas6 »

tetris11 wrote: post #149
totemandtoken wrote: post #133

Reminds me of this classic pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html Specifically this quote: "The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine." There has been a lot of grumblings about the state o…

I feel that we should go down the adblock hosts list approach, where people download website lists from individuals they trust who have curated or scraped links of websites complete with keywords, and its up to the user to refresh their lists and then perform a search on their website.txt file It will be limited, but still quite powerful, similar to the way that we can pick and choose different host file sources from…

Does anyone else remember StumbleUpon? It's not exactly the same as a search engine, but that worked really well for finding interesting content back in the day.

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

#176

Post by busymom0 »

brentis wrote: post #169

Imagine if sort results had table filters and sort. Popularity, Relevance, Age, Type, etc. type could be blog, forum, site, or video. Or like it used to be.

I have been finding recently that Google has been breaking their existing "sort", "time" filters. Try searching for something with site:reddit.com prefix for example and set the time filter to be lets say "Last year". Google still shows you results from 4-5 years ago.

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

#177

Post by Gollapalli »

graycat wrote: post #135

For > Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites? > Discovering unknown paths of the web seems almost impossible with google et al.. > Are there any earch engines which exclude or at least penalize results from, say, top 500 websites? Let's back up a little and then try for an answer: Some points: (1) For some qualitative exclamation , there is a LOT of content on the Internet. (2) T…

Looking forward to it. You got a name?

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

#179

Post by ikeyany »

Scoundreller wrote: post #34
noad wrote: post #4

This is a great question, I also want a way to search the internet but exclude all major media domains as well as any company over a certain size. So I just want to search through old blogs, SO, non-corporate social media, weird forums, etc. There are so many cool things I remember reading on the web like 10-20 years ago that still exist that are so buried now on Google they might as well not exist. Nowadays searchin…

Heh, I was trying to do research on coronaviruses (of which COVID-19 is one of many coronaviruses), but Google sanitized the result and only showed me "official" COVID-19 resources and buried the broader coronavirus resources. https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

In that case, I would omit webpages from the past year.

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

#180

Post by keenmaster »

miek wrote: post #172
keenmaster wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Google Advanced Search produced a visual network map which showed you the salient clusters of terms related to your search? You’d then be able to click on a cluster and the search results would change to adjust to what you’re really searching for. Ex: The network map for “weightlifting” would include many clusters, but 2 big ones would be the hypertrophic cluster (surrounded by a bunch of related terms) and t…

I like this idea a lot. Wonder if anyone is working on this.

No one that I’m aware of. I wouldn’t mind if Google hired me to help make it a reality. I have an email address in my bio (lol).
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