This is awesome! We should definitely move in this direction.
A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
351–360 of 735 posts
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well the focus on text content isn't the only technical difference here. Google is obviously weighing hundreds of signals in its search results that your engine is not accounting for. These omitted signals are also relevant.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might add a donate button or something if people want to help support the project, hardware isn't cheap and all. But I have a job and decent income. I think if this search engine became the way I earned money, it would influence the project in a bad way, and corrupt its purpose, which is to help people explore the less-commercial internet.
I'd donate to continued expansion/development of something like this. Where is somewhere good to follow you for any thoughts/updates?
I have something of a blog here, with an Atom feed.
https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/
It's not very well optimized for mobile, really it's more of a bridge for my geminispace content.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#354I predict it will return a disproportionate amount of sites by schizophrenic conspiracists.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#355Great for a text-focused site- however, the results are a bit confusing. Would help if there were more details on the criteria used for a site to be included in the index.
Suggestion - Use system fonts (the site downloads almost 300k of fonts)
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-…
> is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. They do? That would explain a lot - but ironically, I can't find a good source on this. Do you have one at hand?
It is pretty obvious if you search for any old topic that is also covered incessantly by the news. "royal family" is a good example. There's no way those news stories published an hour ago are listed first due to a high PageRank score (which necessarily depends on time to accumulate inbound links).
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#357Wow, 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…
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Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#358The results are fantastic, but I can't see how the excerpts relate to the search term.
For example, a search term for 'Scotichronicon' returns some fascinating results, but the search term itself doesn't appear in the title or excerpts of most of the results.
This makes it harder to judge how relevant they are.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well the focus on text content isn't the only technical difference here. Google is obviously weighing hundreds of signals in its search results that your engine is not accounting for. These omitted signals are also relevant.
Right, but that is still a technical decision on their side. They presumably don't sit down and have a meeting about what world view they should present. Well I hope they don't.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, those searches are pretty weird.
The pop culture one is fairly common. Me and my wife both search "who the fuck is that" in that TV show movie all the time. Or who is the author of X book?
I think perhaps the usefulness here is less finding what you're looking for, but rather finding something interesting.