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Building a Search Engine from Scratch

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Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#72
post #54
post #8

I don’t see how this will ultimately be successful. They’re basically reverse engineering Google by looking at user logs. Google will always have a leg up here because they have all the Google data. And even if it does work for a while, there still needs to be the original signal to copy. Someone will have to crawl the web and index content. I’m super eager to find new approaches to search, but another Google clone i…

Being successfully might not mean being at the top of the pyramid. DDG is a an example of a successful search engine. Further, they don't have to be better than google in the quality of their search results. As soon as the results have good relevance, it's good competition. What matters is that they are 'good enough', that there is a hint of competition to the Google-Bing monopoly. Offering privacy centric 'competiti…

DDG is not a real search engine, I think this project is way more impressive than DDG.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#73
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does though. There’s a ton of services using a deliberate misspelling in their name and all of them are meh at best in my experience.

this is 100% because you've become inured to how strange it is. Google's name was a joke when it started.

Replacing the 'ol' suffix in 'googol' brings 'google' much closer to common English phonetics. These could all be pronounced the same but would have been a harder sell:

* gugal -- like frugal

* gugle -- like bugle

* ghougle -- like ghoul

* googull -- like gull

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#74

I'd never heard of Cliqz before, but just did a couple of test searches, and I'm honestly super impressed with the results. I found the result relevancy seemed to be closer to Google than DDG/Bing

Maybe so, but honestly, the name is putting me off more than anything. It just doesn't sound professional, and causes me to perceive it as shady, even if it's not. The name also makes it sound like it's more about marketing "clicks" to advertisers than providing good results. None of that is necessarily true, but it's the impression the name gives. It needs to re-brand.

google is such a stupid name to be honest, and what the hell with amazon, is it some Brazilian website?

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#75
post #47
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« DuckDuckGo and other services that just package up Bing search results » Had to look that up. I found https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ Bing is just one of "hundreds of vertical sources delivering" results to DuckDuckGo.

Bing is the primary source though.

Source?

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#76
post #4

Also having built a search engine from scratch, we use a similar method: https://insideropinion.com/ In our case the "queries" are also the index creation components. Every time someone discusses something, we are indexing it, so you can search media, documents, people from context. We hint at how this works here: https://austingwalters.com/fast-full-text-search-in-postgres... The downside of our approach is it needs…

I remember reading your article on FTS in postgres, great stuff. Was wondering what strategies you might be using to perform counts on your data?

I'm trying to implement a faceted search in postgres and currently using window functions to count subcategories (a la http://akorotkov.github.io/blog/2016/06/17/faceted-search/), but not sure if it's the most efficient.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#77
post #47
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« DuckDuckGo and other services that just package up Bing search results » Had to look that up. I found https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ Bing is just one of "hundreds of vertical sources delivering" results to DuckDuckGo.

Bing is the primary source though.

I'm not sure that's true. If you search the same query on both Bing and DDG, you'll see pretty different results.

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#78
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is 100% because you've become inured to how strange it is. Google's name was a joke when it started.

Replacing the 'ol' suffix in 'googol' brings 'google' much closer to common English phonetics. These could all be pronounced the same but would have been a harder sell: * gugal -- like frugal * gugle -- like bugle * ghougle -- like ghoul * googull -- like gull

So should they rebrand as Clickle?

Re: Building a Search Engine from Scratch

#79
post #46
post #29

That Cliqz is trying to actually build a new search stack is commendable. This is way more exciting to me than DuckDuckGo and other services that just package up Bing search results under different branding. I'm skeptical that they'll be successful, but I wish them the best. They should market (and engineer) strongly on privacy since that's where Google is weak.

« DuckDuckGo and other services that just package up Bing search results » Had to look that up. I found https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ Bing is just one of "hundreds of vertical sources delivering" results to DuckDuckGo.

That page basically confirms this. It says

> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack,

which links to https://duckduckhack.com/ which says "DuckDuckHack is now in Maintenance Mode".

And the "four hundred sources" link links to 400 special case replies. They are probably useful, but fire rarely. It's basically Bing, and that page is a bunch of spin.

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