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Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

occamm.com

21–30 of 34 posts

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#21

Hi, I have been working on this search engine for the last few months. After you search for something, you can select up to 4 tags to further refine your search. Feedback please :)

Good luck with the project. Out of curiosity are you crawling and indexing yourself or using a search api? It's really fast, I like that. The amount of tags to choose from is a bit overwhelming. Hope you get good responses here, the couple times I've posted my search engine I haven't gotten a lot of feedback.

Bing is the only search engine that still has a useful public pay as you go API.

Though Startpage claims to be backed by Google, so it must be possible to get a contact with them.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#22
post #4

There are to many tags to be useful, and the quality of tags is low. For example, I searched for banana boat, thinking of the song. "Song" was not one of the tags offered. Nor "day-o", nor Belafonte. But I did get "formation of an attorney-client relationship" and "High levels of benzene". It looks like both of those have a high number of other, related tags, like someone pulled a bunch of tags from one or two web pa…

Thanks for your feedback! yes, you are spot on about the quality of the tags being low for most searches. The current refinement algorithm will get better as more and more people use the service and that would reduce the number of suggested tags and improve their quality over time. I am however working on modifying the algorithm to make the refinement more useful for current users.

That's your classic chicken and egg problem. Few will use the service if the user experience is poor, and your algorithm will not get much useful input.

If you could figure out how to improve it without essentially becoming Google and spending 2 decades and billions of dollars, then we're talking...

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#24
Amazing. However - I did a test where I searched for "Python cast" and got variable type casting results.

I then wanted to refine the search to the cast of Monty Python, but had no relevant tags to do it with.

In google the 6th result on first page was Monty Python wikipedia page.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#25
Neat. I do think there is a lot of room to refine the search engine interface. If the dumpster fire that's Google it's pretty clear that natural language search is just not a good approach. It's extremely frustrating when the search engine is second guessing you.

Your "tags" look like search terms, like key n-grams. I'm guessing because when I extract search terms from a document, I get stuff of a similar "vibe". Maybe easier if I show than try to describe, this is from a unit test I have that runs keyword extraction code on a few documents. I think these are from some page about SSH clients

  unix_source, msi, ssh_authentication_agent, gitweb, pscp, cryptographic_checksums, windows_source, ssh, puttytel, command-line_secure, telnet, windows_html, most_up-to-date_version, psftp, zip, scp, standalone, version_of_putty, scp_client, dsa, putty, plink, rsa_and_dsa, sftp, binaries, unix, up-to-date_version, checksums, rsa, individual_executables, 64-bit_arm, 64-bit_version, source_archive, .zip_archive, 32-bit_arm, latest_release, checksum, standalone_binaries, cryptographic, windows_on_arm, ftp, zipped, versions_of_putty, alternative_binary_files, unix_source_archive, download_putty, sftp_client, latest_released_version, ssh_and_telnet_client, ssh_and_telnet
I've been playing with the idea of doing some sort of Naive Bayes-categorization of the general topic of a web page and using those to offer a broad filtering on my search results. May be a lot of work since it relies on a degree of manual curation, but seems be doable once you have a decent model cooked up. I'd like, when you search for Plato, to be able to offer the alternative of refining the search to the philosopher or the computer system.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#27

Hi, I have been working on this search engine for the last few months. After you search for something, you can select up to 4 tags to further refine your search. Feedback please :)

Good luck with the project. Out of curiosity are you crawling and indexing yourself or using a search api? It's really fast, I like that. The amount of tags to choose from is a bit overwhelming. Hope you get good responses here, the couple times I've posted my search engine I haven't gotten a lot of feedback.

@Ketan-fullstack & @jrussbowman Good luck with your projects. I sometimes wonder if us independent search engine developers should set up a discord or something to chat about what we're doing, because there are quite a few of us working on similar (but not necessarily competing) things.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#29
Its a great idea and you should keep going with this (and nice work so far). You may want to consider the idea of only presenting disambiguating tags. A simple heuristic like finding the top x tags of close to equal cardinality and throw the rest away. The value of what you've built is disambiguation and if you present every single tag, most of those tags are noise. Hope this helps.

Re: Show HN: A search engine that lets you refine your queries

#30

> We share your IP address and your search query with Microsoft Bing, as we use the BING API as our search engine backend

Why would it need to share client's IP address when it can just proxy it? Unless it is doing search queries directly from the client?
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