If only Google allowed us to omit websites from search results.
Google says they need our information to "improve our experience", but we can't tell them what to omit ...
Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
31–40 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#32Google used to let you blacklist websites many moons ago, that would go a long way already. Now there are a few extensions that do that, but obviously they only hide the results from each page, so sometimes you will see pages with 2 results, if any at all.
Would be easy to just inject a negative site clause into the query, e.g. `-site:fandom.com`
It would be nice if there were a way to make the exclusion list de the default for all your queries. For instance, I never want to see results from WikiHow again. Ever. Or the New York Times or any of the other paywalled sites...
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#33I think you could get good results if you just penalise sites for the number of third party JS. Which shows by proxy a more established site/corp.
You could add a bunch of heuristics such as size, number of links etc.
Maybe even train a classifier to select the “smaller” part of the web.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#34This 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Aside from the constraints we apply to market/geography and product type? If that's what you mean, then technically it's a matter of whether the store's ecom platform is compatible with our indexer, which supports ~20 different platforms (and hundreds of variations). Otherwise, we do some light curating for product quality to include, but not limited to, the accuracy of meta data (titling, description) and image quality.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#36DEVONagent 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 particu…
Thank you for the link. This looks really cool. I used DEVONthink years ago. It seemed like a great piece of software but I didn't have a great use case for it. Looking forward to checking out DEVONagent.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#37If only Google allowed us to omit websites from search results. Google says they need our information to "improve our experience", but we can't tell them what to omit ...
They used to allow that, it was very useful. But as with almost everything Google does, they killed it.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#38I made a script on ObservableHQ to surf YouTube psuedo-randomly https://observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/random-place-on-yout...
I do a random city + documentary as the search term, it's taken me all over the world and seen some very strange things.
One of my favourites was Aarhus, which had a Danish language rapper proclaiming he was putting Aarhus on the global map (I have never heard of the city of Aarhus). https://youtu.be/WSZxuzgImLo They dis Copenhagen a lot too, lol. You get a more intimate YouTube experience with the low view videos
But I also seen amazing religious rituals. An excellent documentary on Karachi.
Because it's observable hq you can fork it and figure out your own algorithm for biasing the random.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would be easy to just inject a negative site clause into the query, e.g. `-site:fandom.com`
It would be nice if there were a way to make the exclusion list de the default for all your queries. For instance, I never want to see results from WikiHow again. Ever. Or the New York Times or any of the other paywalled sites...
unpinterested is an extension which simply adds -site:pinterest to image searches. I don't think it'd be hard to do something similar with a custom list.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?
#40This 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…
This is somewhat ironic because 20 years ago, hobbyists would frequently put their obscure personal pages on Geocities and other large corporation's web space.
Memory can be foggy but the most useful were hosted on university pages or random folders off a random domains or you get a subdomain. I picked the username 'search' which gave me search.batcave.net which worked great until one day they just took over the subdomain for a site wide search. They were confused when I complained.
Sure people hosted on geocities and tripod and they were the biggest and easiest to remember. But quality of a geocities page compared to a mit student page was much lower.