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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

#291

Post by wwweston »

foofoo4u wrote: post #218
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…

Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today's web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.

It's also possible that it's the other way around: a certain "common denominator" + algorithms that chase broad engagement = mediocre results.

The real trick would be some kind of engine that can aim just above where the user's at.

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

#293

Post by eigengrau5150 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Yeah so this is my project. It's very much a work in progress, but occasionally I think it works remarkably well for something I cobbled together alone out of consumer hardware and home-made code :-)

I like this. Thanks for doing it.

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

#294

Post by habibur »

foobarian wrote: post #113
b112 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day, I was searching for something, and google's suggested, on-site answers took up 1/2 the first page. All wrong. The actual search results were another 1/4 page of completely identical results, followed by google ad placed search results. I thought to myself, they've finally done it. Real responses are no longer first page. A lot of the cause for google getting crappy, is "ok google", another "all platfor…

I was just thinking that they finally became Lycos. It's what all the search engines except Google looked like back in the early 2000s - ad laden cesspools of irrelevant search results and other content. And it's why we all switched to Google at the time.

It's time to disrupt the market. As Google can't compete with a newcomer that penalize ads on page.

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

#296

Post by silent_cal »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12
muxator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? It's intuitive and super fast. I whish there were more websites with such a simple UI.

Some people like a flashy UI, the modern look is important for them. It's ok to have aesthetic preferences, let's not pretend we don't all have them. In the end, it's a niche search engine I've made, the intended audience is the long tail. It just isn't for everyone, and if it was for everyone, it probably would be lesser for it.

I like the UI.

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

#297

Post by pjspycha »

This is really refreshing work, and we can all benefit from other search engines focused on improving the field. I tried a bunch of searches and some of them were quite wonderful, others were a little dry on results. But overall I enjoyed going through it. Here is some critiques if you don't mind:

I did search for "Daria Bilodid" and the results were a bit troublesome. First the Wikipedia result did not work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria_Bilodid vs https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Daria_Bilodid

Secondly the results matched a few judoinside.com results which is ok, including sites to her competitors, but seemed to miss the judoinside website for her: https://www.judoinside.com/judoka/92660/Daria_Bilodid.

The design is hard on my eyes, I have a average size screen and its using less than half of the width. The line-height is enormous and seems to breakup flow making it uncomfortable for me to read. The spacing around each result is the same as between titles and paragraph items, which again was unpleasant to read.

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

#298

Post by exikyut »

gjm11 wrote: post #280

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…

TIL about https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator, which I am immediately looking forward to playing with once it gains traction Some Time From Now™

(I have no earnest reason to transpile)

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

#299

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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.

>> This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now.

I continue to be curious about this kind of complaint. If all you want is a recipe list, without any of the fluff, why would you click on a link to a blog, rather than on a link to a recipe aggregator?

Foodie blogs exist specifically for the people who want a foodie discussion and not just an ingredients' list.

Is it because blogs tend to have better recipes overall? In that case, isn't there a bit of entitlement involved in asking that the author self-sacrificingly provides only the information that you want, without taking care of their own needs and wants, also?

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

#300

Post by dv_dt »

SPBS wrote: post #274
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.

If one could create an metric of ad to content ratio from the js used, I would guess that would be a nice differentiator too.
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