I used a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) to remove results from Softonic and alikes, it works well, but still very Google.
Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
21–30 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#22The elephant in the room is Baidu.
Ask HN: Is there a search engine which includes only what the Chinese government wants me to see?
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#23I built a search engine for this and other, similar purposes. With Crawl Crawler you start out by searching the meta data of a Common Crawl ("CC") crawl. Then you define a sub section of that data collection by designing a query which search result includes your favorite sites. Then you enrich that sub section by linking those meta data documents (that come from CC's WAT repo) to full text extracts or HTML from CC's WET repo or the WWW. Then you set it to recurringly refresh that section. Voila! You have created a search index that includes your preferred sites. https://crawlcrawler.com
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#24https://wiby.me/ exists to solve this exact problem. I've found some pretty neat/odd websites on it in the past.
It is a carefully curated directory, which is problematic. For example, I submitted Pizza Hut's archived original web page [1], but it wasn't added. Even for a search engine exposing niches, updating a directory manually will likely be too slow, unless the directory is maintaining a single nich (e.g., unladen airspeed of every species of swallow), but then we end up with some insane number of search engines and how t…
Especially if you’re focussing on evergreen information, there’s no reason why people can’t have their own personalized crawler and index— I’ve occasionally thought about rolling my own with a browser extension that lets me add seeds at the click of a button.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#25I'm intrigued by actual use-cases for it except exploring, i.e. where it would give better result for a query than the common search engines.
Anyone reading this, please post if you find any
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#26There used to be java applet embedded in altavista.com's website that could be run against search results. It would do semantic processing on the results and present a list of generated terms, each with a checkbox. Checking a box would pull any returns which contained the topic from the remaining search results.
This was fire. If a topic were being discussed on the web, you could find it with this tool. Unfortunately, it did not fit the vision of the parasitic overlords who bred us to produce and consume for their benefit.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#27DEVONagent is a highly configurable search utility which can be used to combine and de-duplicate results from multiple search engines at once, exclude sites or keywords from a blacklist, follow deep links within search pages, and perform some filtering logic on the text of results.
Before I knew about DEVONagent I would often just search multiple engines and sources trying to find something particular (e.g. a particular PDF) or unique results.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#28There is a search engine with this exact goal: https://millionshort.com/ . I haven't had that great results with it myself though.
I tried it with "waders" which are either the things that you to put on your feet to go fishing or a category of birds (shorebirds or herons). The results after going for all the options were still exclusively stores wanting to sell me the former. Garbage in, garbage out. I guess. Still I like the idea of something to side-step the SEO perhaps with more effort they can make it work but relying on Google or any major…
I've found that you get far better results for many queries on YouTube now since it's tougher to mass spam YouTube with low quality content (compared to churning out a $5 article).
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#29in the same vein, it would be awesome to search for a product to buy with the results being ecomm websites owned by people in my area. A way to "shop local" online.
Shopify released a mobile app recently for this exact purpose.
...but only for stores using Shopify as their ecom platform. That misses A LOT of what's out there, probably 75% or more.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#30in the same vein, it would be awesome to search for a product to buy with the results being ecomm websites owned by people in my area. A way to "shop local" online.
ATTIC: A visual search and discovery engine to help you find the latest products from small, unique businesses near you. https://attic.city/ Currently for three product tiers (furniture, home decor, and fashion/clothing) in 14 major US markets, where stores within ~100 miles or a ~2 hour drive are considered as part of the market. Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.
How do you curate the stores?