Really impressed with the results I’m seeing so far. In all searches I have done so far, the results are truly lightweight, and haven’t had to click through any modals, subscription pop-ups or any other junk thus far! Will be using more in the days to come.
A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
411–420 of 735 posts
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#412Wow. I tested it on recipes which Google has destroyed and this was the first result, a simple clear recipe: http://demont.myds.me/leerecipes/mainmeals/mainmeals1/chicke... compared to Google's endless drivel of "This chicken stir fry recipe will become a staple in your home. It’s so quick to make and you can use whatever vegetables you have on hand. It tastes wonderful regardless of how you alter the ingredients. ..…
This isn’t entirely Google’s fault. Recipes on their own aren’t copyrighted in the US, and adding this fluff text is a way around that.
Yes it is. They're giving a lower quality result to the user (their customer ... but not for long if competitors can get just a little bit better)
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#413Wow this is immediately useful
If you figure out some sort of funding model (maybe even just Patreon) I could totally see this as a viable side project
Already discovered this recipe site: https://based.cooking/
I love how adding recipes is through pull requests: https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/based.cooking/pulls
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#414Is 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…
Is there a way to set marginalia as default search in firefox?
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#415Wow. I tested it on recipes which Google has destroyed and this was the first result, a simple clear recipe: http://demont.myds.me/leerecipes/mainmeals/mainmeals1/chicke... compared to Google's endless drivel of "This chicken stir fry recipe will become a staple in your home. It’s so quick to make and you can use whatever vegetables you have on hand. It tastes wonderful regardless of how you alter the ingredients. ..…
This isn’t entirely Google’s fault. Recipes on their own aren’t copyrighted in the US, and adding this fluff text is a way around that.
It is entirely Google's fault. Google knows people don't want this dreck (everyone knows it) but still serves it up.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#416I liked this one... I searched for 'George Harrison' and among the first results there was a page with interesting comments about Harrison's solo career; someone reminiscing about the time they got to talk to him about guitars for half an hour at a bar at the airport; a transcript for an interview he gave on TV... Whereas on GOOGLE: an instrusive 'People also ask' which I was not interested; thumbnails for videos on youtube that I was not looking for; previews to garbage clickbaity news articles; and then finally for the search items: a bunch of websites for lyrics; his Instagram (!) and fb pages; his imdb page; some more news articles I was not looking for...
Granted, google's web results above are perhaps what people are looking for 75% of the time, but how limiting and boring.
I'm also a sucker for the simplistic text-centric, information-laden pages from the pre-facebook era.
For 'global warming', however - since Marginalia excludes modern web-design pages - the results are of dubious relevance and interest, since they are, well, 'old'.
I see myself using this engine a lot.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Right. Arrow's theorem just says it's impossible to do it in all cases. It's still quite possible to get an improvement in a large proportion of cases, as you're proposing.
Arrows theorem simply doesn't apply here. We don't need our personalized search results to satisfy the majority.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#418Search for playwright waitForSelector and you land in pretty useless page. I'm all in for text websites, but something like playwright.dev documentation is top notch - fuzzy search being key thing.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#419Congratulations. Truly impressive search results. I tried two, one word searches. The results were interesting, useful, and would have been impossible (well, really really hard) to find, on standard search engines. Plus, no garbage, ads, recommendations, etc etc. As another commenter suggested, it is what World Wide Web searches results were like, twenty years ago!
PS. I added Marginalia as a search option (even the default for now) in Firefox Nightly (on Android). In case others want to, under settings for search, you can add other, then name, and then: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s
After a good amount of searching it doesn't seem possible to add Marginalia as default search in firefox (84.0b8) on Debian.
I did not expect this to not be available.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#420One nitpick that kind of bothered me - on a large desktop monitor, the results page was like 70% whitespace margins with the results squished in the middle like a portrait cellphone. Hopefully it's easy to fix, I like to research at home and this website could help a lot!