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

search.marginalia.nu

321–330 of 735 posts

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

#321
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a really bad thing by Google. Their core business is not recipes.

Their core business is making money from other people’s content, no matter what it is.

Their core business is advertising and they have always been in a direct conflict-of-interest by competing with content sites for ad revenue buys.

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

#322

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.

The context matters. I'd happily read "Top 10" lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. "Top 10 Prog Rock albums", while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website.

But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter "new media" blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who's repackaged Wikipedia/Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy writing designed to get people to "share to Twitter/FB". No passion, no expertise. Just eyeballs at any cost.

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

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously, yes.

Moores law means a modern day 2007-style Google should be significantly less expensive to run now than back then.

Also the most relevant patents are now free to use.

2021 Google is a sad story compared to 2007 Google and I'd actually pay to get back 2007 Google - ads included - meaning a double revenue source :-)

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

#324
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if we could pipe search engines.

Definitely; We could create a meta search engine that queries them all, in desktop application format. Let's name it after a famous old scientist, and maybe add the year to prove it's modern: Galileo 2021.

Likely trademark collision with this: https://www.galileo.usg.edu/

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

#325
Looking for an arm assembly instruction, instead I get this strange website as the result http://mailstar.net/coronavirus.html

Is that accidental or is this website promoted because it's text heavy and will surface for any search without many results?

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

#326

Ivermectin (marginalia): https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=ivermectin+ Ivermectin (Google): https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin The difference in the overall _thrust_ of the results is remarkable. Very interesting! Thanks for building it.

Yes, google returns results from the FDA, American Journal of Therapeutics pro Ivermectin study, WebMD, the CDC, the NIH, Wikipedia, the WHO, and New York Times.

Marginalia returns results from Wikipedia, a faculty member’s university blog regarding river blindness, a website called truthsummit promoting it as a miracle cure, a website called vaxxchoice promoting it as a cure, vitamindsstopcovid, etc.

I’d say the quality of the results are quite different.

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

#327

Ivermectin (marginalia): https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=ivermectin+ Ivermectin (Google): https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin The difference in the overall _thrust_ of the results is remarkable. Very interesting! Thanks for building it.

Second result: "Ivermectin, a miracle drug against Covid Ivermectin, a miracle drug against Covid. 100% effective as preventative and for early stage Covid. Over 90% cut in fatality rate for late-stage cases.

https://truthsummit.info/blog/ivermectin-against-covid.html "

Eh I think I'll take the google search results on this one.

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

#328
post #301

Ivermectin (marginalia): https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=ivermectin+ Ivermectin (Google): https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin The difference in the overall _thrust_ of the results is remarkable. Very interesting! Thanks for building it.

The Google results tell you why Ivermectin is not a good replacement for vaccination against Covid, the Marginalia results tell you that Ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating Covid 19. Really shows how much technology has the power to change reality in today's world.

Google links to the FDA, CDC, WHO, NIH, WebMD, drugs.com, and a pro ivermectin journal article from the American Journal of Therapeutics.

The Marginalia results point you mostly to random blogs.

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

#329
post #301

Ivermectin (marginalia): https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=ivermectin+ Ivermectin (Google): https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin The difference in the overall _thrust_ of the results is remarkable. Very interesting! Thanks for building it.

The Google results tell you why Ivermectin is not a good replacement for vaccination against Covid, the Marginalia results tell you that Ivermectin is a miracle drug for treating Covid 19. Really shows how much technology has the power to change reality in today's world.

Part of what I wanted to show with this project is that there is no such thing as an objective search engine. Even seemingly irrelevant technological decisions drastically impact the narrative.

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

#330
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…

To be fair, those searches are pretty weird.

We don't search for things because they're easy to find
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