Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#201

Post by noahc » Wed, May 02, 2012, 11:25 AM UTC

dsrguru wrote: post #196

noahc wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have DDG set as my default search engine, but can you do the following: ! fuji Ames => takes me to Fuji Steak House in Ames Iowa directly !w Sushi => Takes me Directly to the article on Sushi on Wikipedia !m 801 grand ave Des Moines => takes me directly to google maps at the address. I still probably do about 30% of my searches using !g kicking me straight to google for search results.

But how is that different from regular keyword searches? If I want to pull up the Wikipedia article on sushi in Firefox, I enter "w sushi" in the URL bar. If I want to read the Arch Linux wiki article on pacman, I type "arch pacman". If I want to watch Friday by Rebecca Black on Youtube, I type "y Friday", etc. I feel like there's more than a 50% chance that I'm missing something. What does DDG do that browsers don't…

I typed in "w sushi" into chrome and I got https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=c... which google set to my default. I expected to get "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi

Do I have to setup all these different keywords to work? If so that's the difference. It's essentially a pre-configured command line with literally hundreds (thousands?) of predefined syntax for searches.

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#202

Post by tocomment » Wed, May 02, 2012, 12:57 PM UTC

taxonomyman wrote: post #15

tocomment wrote: post #5

I think remove results with my search term in the domain name and this would be perfect! For example I searched for how to start a garden and I can guarantee that startagarden.com is junk. But indie see some useful advice from small blogs etc

How would you like to see this work?

Well for example I searched for "grow a vegetable garden" and I still see a lot of results from URL's like:

http://howtogrowavegetablegarden.net/ http://www.grow-your-own-vegetable-garden.com/

And I just know any domain name optimized for a certain search term is going to be garbage.

I guess a simple version of this feature is you'd have a setting: "Exclude domains that contain my search term".

When the user clicks that you'd compare the domain name (removing all special characters) with my search term (also removing all special characters and white space). Maybe compare via edit distance and exclude if it passes a threshold?

Although edit distance might not work too well, perhaps looking at the longest common substring and if it's > say 90% of the length of my query exclude it?

I guess it would take some playing around. But there should be a good algorithm to exclude domain names very similar to my query.

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#203

Post by djeikyb » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:15 AM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #180

djeikyb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple reasons I've encountered.. 1. User doesn't understand the WWW. They believe Google is THE gateway to everything internet. 2. User doesn't know (or has trouble typing) the exact address. Google tends to have the authoritative result first for popular sites like facebook, amazon, twitter..

I also often don't know the exact address, but browsers autocomplete URL for me. I think it's a fair bet those who search for Facebook already visited Facebook. Why search then?

I prefer to go straight to a site, rather than detour through a search engine. That said, I use chromium, and use the address bar like a search engine. Sometimes the auto-complete half-way through typing is the search rather than the site. If I don't notice..

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#204

Post by dsrguru » Sun, May 06, 2012, 7:15 AM UTC

noahc wrote: post #201

dsrguru wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how is that different from regular keyword searches? If I want to pull up the Wikipedia article on sushi in Firefox, I enter "w sushi" in the URL bar. If I want to read the Arch Linux wiki article on pacman, I type "arch pacman". If I want to watch Friday by Rebecca Black on Youtube, I type "y Friday", etc. I feel like there's more than a 50% chance that I'm missing something. What does DDG do that browsers don't…

I typed in "w sushi" into chrome and I got https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=c... which google set to my default. I expected to get " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi Do I have to setup all these different keywords to work? If so that's the difference. It's essentially a pre-configured command line with literally hundreds (thousands?) of predefined syntax for searches.

Yes, I set those keyword searches myself. So the difference seems to be that with DDG, you just have to learn which shortcuts exist rather than customizing them yourself. That doesn't really sound like it saves much time, but it sounds like the real advantage of DDG is that the act of reading through the DDG list of keywords would probably give me ideas of useful time-saving shortcuts that I'd never think of making on my own.