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

Post by mountain_peak » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #182

mountain_peak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, I co-maintain the only "fan" site on one of my all-time favourite composers/performers, and gave the engine a shot with a unique string query. While my text-heavy WP-driven site didn't seem to make the cut, the results were highly relevant in that they were links to former band members and collaborators - a couple of which I didn't realize existed. That being said, there were a few sites (including my own)…

The search engine doesn't actually do full text search, so maybe your query was too... unique. But do first of all verify that you haven't been hacked. There's about quarter of a million domains I've flagged that, besides their wordpress content, also host a ton of link spam crap off in some hidden folder. This reflects on the quality rating extremely negatively to the point where you may have not been indexed at all…

Post by marginalia_nu » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:17 PM UTC

b-x wrote: post #409

marginalia_nu wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again it's a one man hobby project, I don't have a team of people to go through every formulation and every error message to ensure nobody can read them in a way that offends them. It's just me, writing code on an unfinished project that HN discovered. In this case, the code doesn't match the word regexp, like it may be a @TwitterHandle or a "comp.lang.c" with periods in it, or an unsupported Unicode range. It doesn'…

I must congratulate you on this achievement. That's certainly a useful take on search. Nonetheless, even when coding, one should also consider thoroughly the UX and how it would be addressing the others. Saying "unsupported word" is much more sympathetic than "needs to be a word" (where you define what a "word" is, and the general user is unaware of such definition).

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

eterevsky wrote: post #193

snakeboy wrote: post #114

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…

Imagine if you were looking for the movie.

Post by jerhewet » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:26 PM UTC

Post by scrollaway » Thu, Sep 16, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Yeah so this is my project. It's very much a work in progress, but occasionally I think it works remarkably well for something I cobbled together alone out of consumer hardware and home-made code :-)