21–30 of 181 posts
Unfortunately it seems it doesn't support Cyrillic or Bulgarian well. I googled the mayor of the city I live in and there are 5 results all irrelevant. Unfortunately the experience in 'minor' languages is consistently bad in all alternative search engines.
I think the fact that after a long while there are new search engines (Kagi was introduced very recently on HN, now this) should be a wake up call for Google - their search has lost some shine for quite a while. Hopefully something will come out of this - competition is good.
My first search on Alexandria was "UTC time". Google gives me the current time in UTC, which is all I needed. Alexandria gave me...a lot of links to click to find what I'm looking for. Google search is a lot better than people give it credit for.
The initial commit was 11 months ago and written in C++. I haven’t done C++ since college ~7 years ago. Is it a good language for greenfield projects these days, or would something like Go or Rust (or Crystal, Nim, Zig) be better for maintainability and acquiring contributors?
I think the fact that after a long while there are new search engines (Kagi was introduced very recently on HN, now this) should be a wake up call for Google - their search has lost some shine for quite a while. Hopefully something will come out of this - competition is good.
My first search on Alexandria was "UTC time". Google gives me the current time in UTC, which is all I needed. Alexandria gave me...a lot of links to click to find what I'm looking for. Google search is a lot better than people give it credit for.
What Google arguably struggles with is surfacing relevant documents, that is... search.
It doesn't work well for programming queries :(
https://www.alexandria.org/?c=&r=&q=SPY+current+value https://www.google.com/search?q=SPY+current+value&rlz=1C1ONG... https://www.alexandria.org/?c=&r=&q=kggle https://www.google.com/search?q=kggle&rlz=1C1ONGR_enUS974US9... Search is hard.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44077294/encounter-this-...
I think the fact that after a long while there are new search engines (Kagi was introduced very recently on HN, now this) should be a wake up call for Google - their search has lost some shine for quite a while. Hopefully something will come out of this - competition is good.
I've realized my searching is basically optimized for google and the web that has grown up around it. Also, in 1998 I wasn't as aware of what was out there as I am now. It's pretty rare (even if its possible) that I do a search and come across a completely new site that I haven't heard of before, for anything nontrivial. That was different when search began.
Google is now almost a convenience. If I have a coding question, I search for "turn list of tensors into tensor" or whatever but I'm really looking for SO or the pytorch documentation, and I'll ignore the geeksforgeeks and other seo spam that finds it's way it. It's almost like google is a statistical "portal" page, like Yahoo or one of those old cluttered sites were, that lets me quickly get through the menus by just searching. That's different from a blank slate search like we might have done 25 years ago.
I think what's really lacking now is uncorrupted search for anything that can be monetized. Like I tried to search for a frying pan once on google and it was unusable. I'm not sure any better search engine can fix that, that's why everyone appends "reddit" to queries they are looking for a real opinion on, again, because they are optimizing for the current state of the web.
Anyway, all that to say I think there are a lot of problems with (google dominated) search, but they are basically reflected in the current web overall, so just a better search engine, outside of stripping out the ads, can only do so much. Real improved search efforts need to somehow change the content that's out there at the same time as they improve they experience, and let us know how to, in a simple way, get the most out of it. I think google has a much deeper moat than most people realize