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Alexandria Search

alexandria.org

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Re: Alexandria Search

#61
post #55

There have been a few search engines out recently. I'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. 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.…

> There have been a few search engines out recently I'd like to try them out, could you mention which?

I've been using the Kagi beta for a few months now, and it's awesome: https://kagi.com/

The biggest thing I've found is that when doing technical searches it always turns up the sources I'm actually looking for, actively filtering all the GitHub/StackOverflow copycat sites.

It also seems to up-weight official docs compared to Google. For example, "how to read a json file in python" turns up the Python docs as the second result, where in Google they're nowhere to be found.

Re: Alexandria Search

#63
post #58
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, AI and NLP and raw processing power will have progressed so much that "search" is not a problem anymore, and I think we're getting there. Google can up their game but it won't matter much. The only thing they have left is brand recognition.

IMO search has had its goalpost moved. It used to be about scale, technical challenges, bandwidth, storage, etc. It is still about that, but a significantly harder challenge to solve has come up: searching in a malicious environment. SEO crap nowadays completely dominates search, Google has lost the war. Simply put, I believe that Google sucks at search, in the modern context. It is great at indexing, it has solved p…

> but billion dollar company Google will happily recommend it as the most relevant result above a legitimate website?

Because the site most likely is laden with Google Ads, it's in their interest to show you that garbage and not what you're actually looking for.

Re: Alexandria Search

#64

There have been a few search engines out recently. I'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. 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.…

I'd love to be able to add a tag to a search to have it exclude sites with any kind of monetization, I know that's not realistic cuz that's where Google makes most of its money (or do they make most of their money somewhere other than advertising these days?). Anyways, yeah, I'm sick of SEO optimized, click optimized, advertising optimized, affiliate link optimized crap.

Re: Alexandria Search

#65
Excuse me while I get on a hobbyhorse - would love to use web search that lets me boost PageRank for certain sites (which then would carry over to sites they link to.) Could automatically boost PageRank for sites I subscribe to, for example. Expensive in terms of computation or storage? Charge me!

Re: Alexandria Search

#67
post #33

There have been a few search engines out recently. I'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. 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.…

> because they are optimizing for the current state of the web. I believe people will at least start looking for alternatives. For example, I have been collecting search engines, and whenever I encounter a page with too many commercial-laden SEO-porked results, I use a different search engine in Firefox. I have enabled the Search Bar, I can do Alt+D, Tab, Tab, enter my query, then click a different search engine, whi…

Could you paste again as text links? Thanks.

Re: Alexandria Search

#68

There have been a few search engines out recently. I'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. 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.…

I've been wondering for a while now about building a search engine for the ad free web. That is, penalize or outright refuse to index any recognized advertising network, letting through only those sites which don't perform invasive tracking with third party services. Mostly as a curiosity: what would be left? What would rise to the top when you filter all of that out?

Re: Alexandria Search

#69

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.

[deleted]

Re: Alexandria Search

#70
Slightly tangential, but does anyone know if there is a way to submit links to the Common Crawl (which Alexandria Search relies on)? I haven't seen any traffic from CCBot and my site doesn't seem to show up in Alexandria's results (compared to 2nd/3rd on Google for a bunch of queries).
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