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A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

search.marginalia.nu

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Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#271

Post by pkamb »

Great results for "sauna". Lots of Web 1.0 pages discussing building plans and displaying pictures of individually built, traditional, unique, old saunas on some property.

The Google result are all blogspam or sales pages for cheap shipped saunas. Lots of "IR" results. Phony health benefit pages. Stock photos solely of beautiful new hotel gyms.

I've noticed this problem with Google results for quite some time. Sadly, the new content being created of the top variety is mostly being done within private Facebook groups that can't be easily searched, linked, or archived.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#272

Post by tgv »

bovermyer wrote: post #251

I adore this. Unfortunately, searching for my own name - with or without quotes - doesn't actually find my site. It does find a handful of references to me from over twenty years ago, though, which I thought was fascinating.

My name retrieved the "dead pornstar list". Unexpected.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#274

Post by SPBS »

snakeboy wrote: post #114

Wow, that's awesome. Great work! For a simple test, I searched "fall of the roman empire". In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources. When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle "8 Reasons Why Rome Fell", then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totall…

Cool, it appears that the trend towards JS may be causing self-selection -- if a page has a high amount of JS, it is highly unlikely to contain anything of value.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#276

Post by swyx »

slim wrote: post #275

This is a search engine indexing the internet on a mariadb database hosted on consumer hardware maintained by a single person as a hobby and it does not suffer from HN hug of death

how on earth do you index so much on consumer hardware? my frontend developer mind is blown.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#277

Post by mountainboy »

lucideer wrote: post #201
eterevsky wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you were looking for the movie.

I tend to prefer Wikipedia for movies. The exception is actor headshots if I'm trying to identify someone, which Wikipedia lacks for licensing reasons, but otherwise Wikipedia tends to be better than IMDB for most needs. Wikipedia has an IMDB link on every article anyway. Another need I guess might be reviews, for which RT or MC are better than IMDB: not sure if either of those two will fare better than IMDB in this…

For me, imdb was much better when they had user comments/discussion.

I never even posted on it myself, but browsing the discussions one could learn all sorts of trivia, inside info, speculation, etc about each movie.

Since they (inexplicably) killed that feature, I rarely even visit anymore. Your right, for many purposes wikipedia is better, especially for TV series episode lists with summaries.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#278

Post by SerLava »

jandrese wrote: post #160
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as few people use it, it will be great. Rest assured that the moment it becomes popular, the people who want to game it will appear.

This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.

That's not really for SEO, which favors readily accessible information.

That's ads. When mobile users have to scroll past 10 add, theyll click on some of them and make the blog money.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#279

Post by Razengan »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #208
burkaman wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That query is too long apparently. But if you shorten to "haskell type inference", I think it delivers on its promise: > If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

The search engine doesn't do any type of re-ordering or synonym stuff, it only tires to construct different N-grams from the search query. So if you for example compare "SDL tutorial" with "SDL tutorials". On google you'd get the same stuff, this search engine, for better or worse doesn't. This is a design decision, for now anyway, mostly because I'm incredibly annoyed when algorithms are second-guessing me. On the o…

It could simply become an option.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#280

Post by gjm11 »

I tried a few searches.

>: none of the search results appeared to have anything to do with Javascript pipe syntax. (Which doesn't exist yet, but it's under discussion.) Google gives a bunch of highly-relevant results.

>: first result is a list of books about relativity, one of which is Reichenbach's "Philosophy of space and time"; good, but there's no real information there. Second is about Reichenbach but nothing to do with relativity or even, really, philosophy of science. Third is about philosophy of science and mentions some of Reichenbach's work but not related to relativity. Fourth mentions Reichenbach's "Philosophy of space and time" as part of a list of books relevant to a seminar on "time and eternity". None of this is bad, but it's not great either. Google gives a couple of online philosophy encyclopaedia entries, then a journal article on "Hans Reichenbach's relativity of geometry", then the Wikipedia article on Reichenbach ... much more informative.

>: I thought this would be an easy one. It was easy for Google, which gave me her name in large friendly letters at the top, then her IMDB entry, and a bunch of other relevant things. Literally nothing in the Marginalia results was relevant to the query.

I guess maybe popular culture is just too monetizable, so no one is going to write about it on the sites that Marginalia crawls? Let's try some slightly less popular culture.

>: First result is kinda-relevant but weird: it's about a musical adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. It doesn't mention that famous line from the play, but one of the numbers in the musical has the words "a handbag" in the title. Second result is a review of a CD of musicals, including the same work. Third is a bunch of short reviews of theatrical items from the Buxton Festival Fringe, one of which is a three-man adaptation of TIOBE. Next four are 100% irrelevant. Next is a list of names of plays. Last one is actually relevant; it's an article about "Lady Bracknell through the decades". Google puts that one first (after, sigh, a bunch of YouTube videos which look as if they might actually be relevant).

I really like the idea of this, and many of the things it turns up look like they might be interesting, but it isn't doing very well at producing results that are actually relevant to the thing being searched for.

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