81–90 of 492 posts
No mention of DDG in the comments? Is there a reason I'm not seeing or it's just not the preferred alt-search on HN? Seems to have been working fine for me when I struggle to get past the funnels and content mills on Google.
Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive. I believe my algorithms…
Perhaps trolling the entire web is not useful today? I’d love a search engine where I can whitelist sites or take an existing whitelist from trusted curators.
Natural Language Processing is a pox on modern search engines. I suspect that Google et. al. wanted to transform their product into an answer engine that powers voice assistants like Siri and just assumed everyone would naturally like the new way better. I can't stand how Google is always trying to guess what I want, rather than simply returning non-personalized results solely based on exactly what I typed in the tex…
I think some NLP is strictly beneficial for a search engine. You may think "grep for the web" sounds like a good idea, but let me tell you, having tried this, manually going through every permutation of plural forms of words and manually iterating the order of words to find a result is a chore and a half. Like, instead of trying PDP11 emulator PDP-11 emulator "PDP 11" emulator PDP11 emulators PDP-11 emulators "PDP 11…
Early Google was a breath of fresh air compared to the stemming that its competitors at the time did, but nowadays even putting search terms in quotes doesn't seem to return the same quality of results for these types of queries that Google used to have.
Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive. I believe my algorithms…
Perhaps trolling the entire web is not useful today? I’d love a search engine where I can whitelist sites or take an existing whitelist from trusted curators.
No mention of DDG in the comments? Is there a reason I'm not seeing or it's just not the preferred alt-search on HN? Seems to have been working fine for me when I struggle to get past the funnels and content mills on Google.
For me, DDG results are even worse than Google. It's set as my default and I'd say at least half of my searches in DDG generate completely useless results...pages of obviously SEO'd garbage. DDG also doesn't support showing a site's basic structure in the search results (ie, the card of a company's website with Products, Contact Us, Support, etc) and the preview text is garbo as well...it reminds me of 1990's era ele…
Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive. I believe my algorithms…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to say but your project is 20 years old and it had no impact at all. You are doing something wrong. Innovation and initiative is needed ala Bitcoin and DeFi not hobby projects which are not picking up in popularity and utility.
Bitcoin and DeFi don't have utility outside of gambling and pump and dumps. Not everything (tbh not really anything) needs crypto.
Ha, yes, I've done that at https://gigablast.com/ . The biggest problems now are the following: 1) Too hard to spider the web. Gatekeeper companies like Cloudflare (owned in part by Google) and Cloudfront make it really difficult for upstart search engines to download web pages. 2) Hardware costs are too high. It's much more expensive now to build a large index (50B+ pages) to be competitive. I believe my algorithms…
how recent are your results? 1-2h? 1 day?
The web has changed drastically. I’d imagine 2005-google engine today would be nothing but abandoned Wordpress blogs with comment spam.
If you took an exact copy of Google circa-2005 and had it crawl today's web, you'd probably get mostly "SEO optimized" irrelevant blogspam.
I think DuckDuckGo is closer to what you want. Same results for everyone, better privacy, and they're proactive about improving their results. https://duckduckgo.com/ Part of the problem is that there's a lot more low-quality content to wade through now than there was in 2005. I think the Google of 2005 would have trouble delivering quality results today also.
Brave search has been my daily driver and it works wonderful.