191–200 of 236 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
COVID-19 isn't a coronavirus, it's the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
American media calls both disease and virus "corona". They seem to care little about such details.
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…
Can you talk at a high level about the problems of keyword search, or is that part of your secret sauce? Off the top of my head I can think of two, which are intent and encoding . Before you can even do a keyword search, you obviously need an intent to do so. But that means keyword search is pretty useless when you don't know what you don't know. Encoding that intent...maybe doesn't matter for common searches, but ev…
For
> Before you can even do a keyword search, you obviously need an intent to do so. But that means keyword search is pretty useless when you don't know what you don't know.
Right: The way at times in the past I have put something like that is to say that, ballpark, to oversimplify some, keyword search requires the user to know what content they want, know that it exists, and have keywords/phrases that accurately characterize that content. For some searches, e.g., the famous movie line
"I don't have to show you no stinking badges",
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqomZQMZQCQ
that is fine; otherwise it asks too much of the user.
For "encoding", my work does not use keywords or any natural language for anything.
My work does get some new data for each search for each user. But privacy is relatively good because for the results I use only what the user gives for that search; in particular, two users giving the same inputs at essentially the same time will get the same results. Thus, search results are independent of the user's IP address or browser agent string. Moreover, the site makes no use of cookies.
The role of the advanced pure math is to say that the data I get and the processing I do with that data and what is in the database should yield good results for the 2/3rds. The role of my original applied math is to make the computations many times faster -- they would be too slow otherwise.
When keywords work well, and they work well enough to be revolutionary for the world, my work is, except for some small fraction of cases, not better. So, there is ballpark the 1/3rd where keywords work well. Then there is the ballpark, guesstimate, 2/3rds I'm going for.
My work is not as easy for the users as picking a great, very accurate, result from the top dozen presented by a keyword search engine, e.g., the movie line example, but is much easier to use than flipping through 50 pages of search results and is intended usually to give good results unreasonable to get from a keyword search, without "characterizing" keywords, that yields, say, millions of search results and would require a user to flip through dozens of pages of search results.
Ads are off on the right side and not embedded in the search results. The SEO (search engine optimization) people will have a tough time influencing the search results!
We will see how well users like it. If people like it, then it will be good to make progress on the huge, usually neglected, content of the 2/3rds.
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…
Especially shopping. The endless stores are the worst part of search results. If I search for anything that remotely looks like a product, the results are just choked with store after store trying to sell me the thing. Awful.
Basically the idea is to have people band together and "recommend" links. You then do your normal spidering of the websites to create a search engine (or even just call through to a number of existing search engines). However, the ranking of the results is based on the weighting of the recommendations.
It's essentially a white list based on your own personal bubble. Of course this won't work in general because you will always get SEO creeps spamming recommendations. However, it gives you tools for working around those creeps. The average person probably won't be able to manage it, but power users probably will.
By not trying to solve the problem for everybody, it makes it easier to solve to problem for some people. Or at least that's my thesis :-) I might be wrong.
There is Million Short which allows you to search without the top 100, 1k, 10k, 100k, or 1m sites. Personally what I'd like to see is a search engine that only indexes webpages without ads since that should eliminate lots of the SEOd garbage. It would also be nice to use the text to code ratio to derank JS heavy sites. https://millionshort.com/
And blacklist anything with those outbrain blocks. “One weird trick to _____.” Very surprised where I see those these days, and they always make me run away.
I would pay real subscription money for a search engine that focused on knowledge-oriented results rather than retail and commercial results. When I type “shoes”, it would give me: links for the functional and creative history of footwear, the taxonomy of shoes, methods of construction, current and historical footwear industry data, synonyms and antonyms, related terms and professions, the dictionary definition, and…
* when you make a query to this knowledge base, it has a history of your prev searches / preferences (not google)
* it can propose variants of suggestions on what is your intent in this particular query - and make much more detailed queries (auto include/exclude keywords websites etc) to multiple sources (not only google, maybe anonymously)
* it can parse results from these sources and re-arrange them (use own rank system) according to the your preferences. In this system, you can explicitly say - I hate that, and I like that, and this will affect the behavior. Yes this is 'information bubble' but it is controlled by you and not by google!
* finally, this system may work in background and handle 'research' search queries. What I mean here: currently, Google is about instant search - it gives you results in milliseconds, and that's all. It cannot spend much computations for more precise, more intellectual check of content in links from the search results - it cannot do reasoning - and you have to do that by yourself: open links from 1-st page, and close most of them immediately b/c they are not relevant for you, go to 2-nd page and so on. It would be cool if most of this could be automated - with modern natural language processing approaches and old-school prolog-like reasoning this is real and not a fantastic from sci-fi.
My vision that this kind of search assistant cannot be SaaS / closed source. It is about the freedom - and thus this should be open source / self-hosted app that can be deployed on PC or on cloud VM - but hosting should be controlled by end-users, not companies.
I don't know if something like this ever exist. If not, maybe its time to create it.
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…
For years, my trick for finding interesting content was to go to, say, the 7th page of Google results, and start there. This doesn't work anymore -- it's SEO-optimised listicle blog posts all the way down. My trick now is to use Twitter to discover interesting people, and follow them there. Granted, it's not a search engine, but it's at least given me the ability to discover weird things again.
- health search that excludes sellers, wellness and snake-oil websites
- news search that excludes conspiracy theories, magical thinking, political operatives, and paid bloggers
- image search by similarity, similarity to an uploaded picture/s, words, or description
- media and warez search engine that excludes link-spam and malware sites
- complex queries search because none of them do it well
- anonymity
- shopping search that kicks out disreputable sellers and phony store-fronts
- mapping like OSM but fast, practical with an app, and detail-accessible
- monetize using affiliate links that don't affect ranking
- semi-curated results (domain reputation-ranked voting)
- related pages
- inbound/outbound links search
- archive.org integration &| history page caching
- documented query syntax
- query within results
- quick query history results navigation
- keyword alerts
- keyboard shortcuts that always work