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Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

didyougogo.com

61–70 of 131 posts

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#61
post #60

I'm Marcus, founder of Didyougogo and author of the software behind it. For the past ten years I've been trying to improve my programming and math skills to get to a level where I could write a proper web search engine for the written word using absolute cutting-edge IR methods. The final result is something I have not seen or read about: a language represented as a 65K wide vector-space, serialized into a binary tre…

Why not using javascript?

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#63
post #61
post #60

I'm Marcus, founder of Didyougogo and author of the software behind it. For the past ten years I've been trying to improve my programming and math skills to get to a level where I could write a proper web search engine for the written word using absolute cutting-edge IR methods. The final result is something I have not seen or read about: a language represented as a 65K wide vector-space, serialized into a binary tre…

Why not using javascript?

I'm doing those who don't care about javascript a favor by not serving them code to run on their client even though their browser is set to willfully do this. Because I'm sure they didn't ask for me to drain their battery. I'm trying to save energy. It's not free yet.

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#64
post #32

A search engine without https, I think I'll stick with Google for now.

I think it’s a trade off. I think I’d rather have all my searches and traffic visible than all of my searches and traffic only visible to the company best in the world capable of storing forever and marketing to me.

I’m not quite sure the exact privacy trade-off but for things that I consider non-sensitive, I certainly prefer non-https web.

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#66
post #60

I'm Marcus, founder of Didyougogo and author of the software behind it. For the past ten years I've been trying to improve my programming and math skills to get to a level where I could write a proper web search engine for the written word using absolute cutting-edge IR methods. The final result is something I have not seen or read about: a language represented as a 65K wide vector-space, serialized into a binary tre…

I'm glad I could make you curious about this. I will gladly expand on the documentation around the language model and querying as soon as I can.

In broad terms: its a 16-bit vector space in which you can encode anything you like. I have chosen to encode phrases and words as bags-of-characters. This separates terms from each other enough that they can be searched for reliably (in almost all cases).

Terms that share a character have vectors that intersect one another and we can measure the cos angle between them. That's the score.

That is represented as a binary tree.

A scan in the tree gives you the closest match and an address into a file on disk; a list of document IDs.

At query time boolean logic is used on the result (document ID list) from each query clause (AND/OR/NOT key:value).

I'll write something up.

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#67
post #15

One of colleagues argues that search has become infrastructure and thus there should be an offering from the state which is also responsible for other infrastructure. There was a (failed) attempt by the EU I know about. And I don’t see that happening in the near future.

Your friend is right in theory, but in practice no State is capable of providing such a service.

The US isn’t even capable of providing a search interface to its own web sites that competes with commercial offering (eg, using google is better than the sites built in search).

The EU attempt was called Qaero [0] and wasn’t an exact google didyougogo competitor as I think it’s focus was on video and audio. But they spent at least $99M from 2005-2013 and had absolutely trash results.

It’s kind of weird how hard it is for some organizations to do some things. You would think with a hundred million bucks you would get something. DDG [1] was self funded initially and then with $3M and they are pretty useful despite 30x less funding.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/duck-duck-go

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#68
post #64
post #32

A search engine without https, I think I'll stick with Google for now.

I think it’s a trade off. I think I’d rather have all my searches and traffic visible than all of my searches and traffic only visible to the company best in the world capable of storing forever and marketing to me. I’m not quite sure the exact privacy trade-off but for things that I consider non-sensitive, I certainly prefer non-https web.

https isn't just about something being sensitive or not. If there's no https then everyone can just inject stuff in the page and do whatever like your ISP showing ads and siphoning out your search history, a random person in a coffeeshop adding a malicious site to your search results,...

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#69
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Altavista was great when its raison d'etre was to show off the Alpha. (I still miss proper boolean queries.)

There is a hack to have the desktop Altavista search tool index gopher... https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/building-a-search-engine-for... I've done it with a static set of data, the UTZoo Usenet data... http://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com Shame it died on the vine, distributed, and curated search was a powerful tool in the days of Veronica and Archie

istributed, and curated search was a powerful tool in the days of Veronica and Archie

No it wasn't. I'm old enough to have (tried to) use it, and it was terrible.

It was usually quicker and got better results to manually connect to FTP sites, and run directory listing on likely directories untily ou found what you were looking for.

Re: Show HN: Didyougogo – An Altavista slayer

#70

Is there a way to be notified of product updates?

I would love to notify you of the progress this project makes. As of now there is no email list and I'm not sure there should be one. How about if I announce these things on the home page and you come back to it, say in a week and do one query and one URL submission after having read a blog post about the progress?

Please? :)

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