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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?

#211

Post by icedistilled »

dorkwood wrote: post #196
joshspankit wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that news websites happily adopted those is disgusting. They're literally tricking people into thinking it's news content.

And they also, for the longest time, strongly turned me off paying for any news sites. The more they use scummy ads that turn people off, the more they need ad revenue.

That's a nice negative feedback loop or catch-22

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

#212

Post by severine »

nic-waller wrote: post #136

My hobby project is https://random.surf (works better on desktop than mobile). I share that same desire to visit the web less travelled. I want to discover interesting sites that deserve to be bookmarked because they will never show up in a search engine.

Thank you!

True "Interdimensional Cable" vibes.

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

#213

Post by Wistar »

Theodores wrote: post #206
teamspirit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further, CoViD-19 literally stands for: Co[rona] Vi[rus] D[isease] - [discovered in 20]19 - "D" standing for disease caused by this particular strain. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed when I found out, though I admit now it's a little refreshing to have be so simply named.

Which can be further abbreviated as C19. I have seen this in personal chats and wonder how long it will be before it gets into newspaper headlines where space is at a premium in print editions.

I already see it in publications but more frequently see the variant C-19.

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

#215

Post by chongli »

bmd3991 wrote: post #131

What I’d like to see is a search that excludes any page with ads, and any page with affiliate links. That alone would get rid of 90% of the garbage

I've expressed this wish on HN a few times in the past as well. One downside to it that I can think of (off the top of my head) is that there may be a lot of small, personal websites that are hosted on a free blogging platform which injects ads into every page. These websites may be very valuable (and not SEO garbage link farms) but would get blocked nevertheless.

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

#216

Post by type0 »

ryandrake wrote: post #194
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…

If there was a way to simply exclude from searches: shopping, news, images, videos, and “listicles”, I think that would get us most of the way. 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.

If you do your own search engine like that, implementing rules that block affiliated commerce blogs from appearing would help alot.

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

#217

Post by dexen »

There is a similar problem where Youtube's recommendations and auto-play are mostly big name brands, to the exclusion of individual reporters, commentators, and other content producers. Since recently, a "De-Mainstream Youtube" plugin[1] is available for Firefox and Chrome, fixing that to some extent.

--

[1] https://demainstream.com/

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

#218

Post by Terretta »

halfdan wrote: post #205
tomaskafka wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many times I have thought about what could happen if Twitter asked you to recommend up to 3-5 people you value, and write a tweet-sized (or shorted) recommendation. Over time you would get a 'pagerank for people' and could do awesome stuff with that, like 'You don't know XYZ, but 3 people you trust trust her, and this is what they tell about her:' ...

Until that gets screwed using social engineering and people optimising for being affiliated with people writing them good reviews.

You know, for people with Klout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout

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

#219

Post by dorkwood »

gbin wrote: post #198
dorkwood wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree on the original issue but social media tailored to people's own bubble is probably not a good source for enlightenment either...

I think it depends how you use it.

One of the things I enjoy doing on Twitter is posting up something I'm working on, and then clicking through to all the profiles of the people who like, comment, or retweet my work. I stumble across an incredibly diverse range of people by doing this, many with conflicting opinions to my own, and many who belong to strange subcultures that I don't understand, but who were all drawn to my work for one reason or another.

I think there's definitely a danger of crafting a bubble for yourself if you choose to use it that way, but as a tool for discovering people making cool stuff who otherwise wouldn't cut through the noise on something like Google search, I haven't found anything better.

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

#220

Post by Shared404 »

texasbigdata wrote: post #102
fermienrico wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Not even sure "don't be evil" is still written down. [1]

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

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