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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

#381

Post by seph-reed »

exikyut wrote: post #298
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)

Yeah, this seems pretty nice. I don't think the "deep nesting" issue is quite so realistic... I very rarely have a logic tree that's easier to identify by its leaves than its root. And I'd really hate to have code where you have to scroll to the end of a bunch of pipes to figure out what they're adding up to

But I have plenty of single use "temp variables" and cutting those out could be cool.

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

#382

Post by fghfghfghfghfgh »

b-x wrote: post #371

Too bad it rejects non-Latin words, as if the definition of "text" is a sequence of alphabetical letters originated from Latin. I thought that we've reached the time to embrace all cultures in the world, but this retrogressive engine proves that most modern tech designers are myopic about other civilizations in the globe.

It’s one guy. Making a useful tool. It even has an altruistic purpose.

Shame on you for twisting a well intended effort into a negative statement that suits your narrow identity political world view.

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

#383

Post by prewett »

Kudos for taking on this project, and I like the idea! I think it'll be a big project to take it to the next level, but would love to have a search engine that's more useful.

Some reactions:

- The font is really big and the columns really narrow, so I get 3 - 4 entries per page, something like 8 words per line, and huge spacings between lines, which makes it a frustrating experience. I've been using the recommendations in https://practicaltypography.com/, which recommends 60 - 90 characters in a line I think, and line spacing of 120% - 140% (I like 125%). The line lengths here might technically fall within the lower bound, but it's really short, and for search results I'm going to try scanning the text to see if there's something relevant, so I think going on the long side is better here. At least make the width somewhat variable so that I can shrink the rather large font and fit more on the line.

- The results are eclectic, but I'm not sure it's usable at the moment. "scala append list" did not get me much that's helpful, while Google will usually at least put up some click-farming tutorial that although minimal effort does tend to answer the question. Both "mapo doufu recipe" and "ma po do fu recipe" had very few recipes, although the latter did have one. Unfortunately, recipe websites are some of the worst, with about 10 pages of description, ads, pictures, what-have-you until the recipe at the very bottom. "collection unmitigated pedantry" did return the acoup.blog entry at the top, though.

Good luck on the project!

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

#384

Post by tomerv »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #373

Is there anyway to add this as a favored search engine in the browser? I currently use google as it's set as the default search when I type in the address bar but would love to switch and move google/ddg to a added character like " @g"

All the major browsers support adding custom search engines. You just need to specify the URL template to do the search. The common format is to put "%s" as the search term. You can use it for any site, not just things that are considered search engines.

Firefox is a bit different, since you do it by adding a bookmark, and giving that bookmark a keyword. The other browsers I checked have an option under the search engine settings.

After defining the custom search engine, you just type " " in the URL bar.

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

#385

Post by hombre_fatal »

b-x wrote: post #371

Too bad it rejects non-Latin words, as if the definition of "text" is a sequence of alphabetical letters originated from Latin. I thought that we've reached the time to embrace all cultures in the world, but this retrogressive engine proves that most modern tech designers are myopic about other civilizations in the globe.

No, it just proves that a one-man hobby project with finite resources found it reasonable to restrict the scope.

Maybe when they find out they're an immortal billionaire they can build all the additional things you've entitled yourself to expect from the freely shared work of others.

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

#386

Post by marginalia_nu »

b-x wrote: post #371

Too bad it rejects non-Latin words, as if the definition of "text" is a sequence of alphabetical letters originated from Latin. I thought that we've reached the time to embrace all cultures in the world, but this retrogressive engine proves that most modern tech designers are myopic about other civilizations in the globe.

Understand that this is something I built for myself, by myself, so it focuses on languages I understand. It hosted on a single consumer grade computer in my living room. I built it out of pocket and anyone is free to use it. Does this make me a villain?

If I can do this, what's preventing some guy in Japan or India or Peru from doing the same, of course focusing on their languages?

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

#387

Post by llbeansandrice »

tomerv wrote: post #384
llbeansandrice wrote: post #373

Is there anyway to add this as a favored search engine in the browser? I currently use google as it's set as the default search when I type in the address bar but would love to switch and move google/ddg to a added character like " @g"

All the major browsers support adding custom search engines. You just need to specify the URL template to do the search. The common format is to put "%s" as the search term. You can use it for any site, not just things that are considered search engines. Firefox is a bit different, since you do it by adding a bookmark, and giving that bookmark a keyword. The other browsers I checked have an option under the search en…

Ah I'm on FF so I'll have to do the weird bookmark method. A little annoying since it supports other search engines.

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

#388

Post by WorldMaker »

giantrobot wrote: post #361
WorldMaker wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of recipe blog hasn't happened just for SEO. It's also a bit of a "two audiences" problem: if you are coming to that food blogger from a search you certainly would prefer the recipe first and then maybe any commentary on it below if the recipe looks good. If you are a regular reader of that food blogger you are probably invested in the stories up top and that parasocial connection and the recipes themselves…

> If you are a regular reader of that food blogger I think this assumes facts not in evidence. It certainly seems like an overwhelming number of "blogs" are not actual blogs but SEO content farms. There's no regular readers of such things because there's no actual authors, just someone that took a job on Fivver to spew out some SEO garbage. Old content gets reposted almost verbatim because new results better accordin…

I know at least a few that I commonly see in top search results that I have friends that read them like personalized soap operas where most of the drama revolves around food and family and serving food to family.

It's at least half the business models of Food Network shows: aspirational kitchens and the people that live in them and also sometimes here's their recipes. (The other half being competitions, obviously.) I've got friends that could deliver entire doctoral theses on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen (and its many YouTube shows and blogs) and the huge soap operatic drama of 2020's events where the entire brand milkshake ducked itself; falling into people's hearts as "feel good" entertainment early in 2020/the pandemic and then exploding very dramatically with revelations and betrayals that Fall.

Which isn't to say that there aren't garbage SEO farms out there in the food blogging space as well, but a lot of the big ones people commonly complain about seeing in google's results do have regular fans/audiences. (ETA: And many of the smaller blogs want to have regular fans/audiences. It's an active influencer/"content creator" space with relatively low barrier to entry that people love. Everyone's family loves food, it's a part of the human condition.)

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

#389

Post by RattleyCooper »

dvogel wrote: post #356
amenod wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

It depends on the content. The flip side is looking up a programming-related question and getting results from 2012.

I think they take different things into account based on the thing being searched.

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