371–380 of 492 posts
Early 2000s google index ran in a garage. The current google index has dedicated power stations. It's a bit like the car industry - you could run a startup from your garage in the early days but you need titanic amounts of capital to compete now thanks to vertical integration. Major governments and billionaires can compete but everybody else is locked out of the market (most "startups" use bings index).
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They do use Bing, but not solely Bing. DDG isn't just a frontend to a different search engine.
It's a bing frontend with a few special cases handled differently. For most queries, you get bing results. Easy to check by comparing results.
You might call this a search engine based on the principle of Information Neutrality. “Information Neutrality is the principle to treat all information provided (by a service) equally. The information provided, after being processed by an information-neutral service, is the same for every user requesting it, independent of the user’s attributes, including, e.g., origin, history or personal preferences and independent…
I like Firefox's UI when searching, where you can select the search engine of choice while typing a query.
I like customizable metasearch engines like searx, I think it is a phenomenal idea. I wish more niche engines would implement OpenSearch so that they could easily be added.
I have considered just making a simple web page with search boxes for multiple engines for personal use as a default home page, but there's friction and again, lots of engines I'd like to use don't implement OpenSearch.
I wonder if there's some novel UX approaches to this out there. Meta search engines seem to be the best way so far to do it but there's the problem of customizing ranking, relevance of results and the like that just compounds the problems users experience.
Just let me type stuff into the search box -- including typo corrections and modifications to what I'm searching for -- and hit ENTER to start the actual search.
When I'm ready to start my search I'll hit the fucking ENTER key. Stop annoying me with your stupid assumptions about what I'm looking for.
This ONE THING is why I switched to Webcrawler.com two years ago. I type in five or ten words with ZERO craptastic guesses flashing around on my screen, hit ENTER, and THEN it returns what I'm looking for.
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…
Have you contributed your crawl data to common crawl?
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Trusted curators is a dangerous dependency
How about just a meritocratic rating? Even here on HN I would appreciate some sort of weight on expert/experienced opinion. Although in theory I like the idea that every thought is judged on its own, the context of the author is more relevant the deeper the subject. That's one of the reasons I still read https://lobste.rs . It has a niche audience with industry experience.
I'm probably the only person who doesn't think Google search has deteriorated. I play security CTFs, so a lot of times I have to search for peculiar technical details on various software. Also, like any other human being, I also make generic queries. In both cases, I feel like I almost always get to the desired webpage within the top few results.
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I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. Back then Google was only going up against indexes and link-rings, not 2021 Google/Bing/DDG/etc.
2005? There were loads of other search engines (SE), and many meta-SE: hotbot, dogpile, metacrawler, ... (IIRC), plenty more. There was also indexes, which Yahoo, AOL (remember them!) had but there was, what was it called, dmoz?, the open web directory. When Google started, being in the right web directory gave you a boost in SERPs as it was used as a domain trust indicator, and the categories were used for keywords.…
Google replaced Altavista in my usage, who in turn were usually better than their predecessors.
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> You do a search on Gigablast and say, well, why didn't it get this result that Google got. And that's because the index isn't big enough I wionder how much this is true, and how much (despite all our rhetoric to the contrary) it's because we have actually come to expect Google's modern proprietary page ranking, which counts more than just inbound links but all sorts of other signals (freshness, relevance to our pre…
Well if the result didn't appear in the first 5-10 pages, it's probably not in the index. You can see it with other search engines. I challenge you to come up with a Google query for which a first-page result won't be seen within the first 10 pages of Bing results for the same query. (Bonus points if that result is relevant). There's only so much tweaking that personalization and other heuristic can do. But if someth…
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Is this the same as enclosing the terms in quotes and using the !g bang?
it's a google "verbatim" search. I don't know if enclosing each term separately in quotes does the same thing, but this is easier anyway.