341–350 of 735 posts
millionshort.com
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…
I had the exact opposite experience. I searched the site for "java", got a Wikipedia link first (for the island, not the programming language), and the 2nd result was to a random JEP page, and all the rest of the results were random tidbits about Java (e.g. "XZ compression algorithm in Java). Didn't get any high level results pointing to an overview of the language, getting started guides, etc.
What kind of links where you expecting to find?
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 purpose of the tool is primarily to help you find and navigate the strange parts of the internet. Where, for sure, you'll find crack-pots, communists, libertarians, anarchists, strange religious cults, snake oil peddlers, really strong opinions.
and
> If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool.
I'm looking at "punishes modern web design"... This thing IS modern web design. I think it's called "marginalia" in reference to the huge margins they chose!
I'm using a browser on a linux desktop and side-by-side, HN's page design is old-fashioned tasteful making pretty good use of space, and maginalia has a font that's more than twice the 2D pointsize and is so spread out with whitespace that the "Tips" on the home page are off the bottom of my window.
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Meta search engines leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth because they've always failed. Here is why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... You can't combine a few different ranked lists and expect to get results better than any of the original ranked lists.
> You can't combine a few different ranked lists and expect to get results better than any of the original ranked lists. I am skeptical of this application of the theorem. Here is my proposal: Take the top 10 Google and Bing results. If the top result from Bing is in the top 10 from Google, display Google results. If the top result from Bing is not in the top 10 from Google, place it at the 10th position. You'd have…
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Not sure, but I remember when Google could find literally anything. Then they started adding a bunch of exceptions and crapped out their quality. I wonder how insanely different results would be to get the older Google Engine from the 2000s search result wise. I now have to play games with Google to find things. I feel like I do less than I used to for some reason.
Wacky idea: instead of Google changing it's algorithm every couple of years, it could run 50 algorithms in parallel leaving no way for sites to "optimise" for the current one.
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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…
This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again. It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let's say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-…
They do? That would explain a lot - but ironically, I can't find a good source on this. Do you have one at hand?