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Alexandria Search

alexandria.org

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Re: Alexandria Search

#81

Post by rambambram »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #12
tandr wrote: post #9

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.

This doesn't add up, at all. I have a clock on my computer. This new search engine doesn't function like a clock for you, so Google Search is better.

Re: Alexandria Search

#82

Post by not2b »

zeta0134 wrote: post #68
version_five wrote: post #30

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?

Wikipedia.

Re: Alexandria Search

#83

Post by 51Cards »

So, interesting thing, how when I visit this site for the first time (in Firefox) is the search box showing a drop down with a bunch of my previous searches? I can't tell where they are from but it is all stuff I have searched for in the past. I thought it might be the browser populating a list but that should be based on same domain. So where is it pulling this from? Some of the searche terms are months, perhaps more than a year old.

Re: Alexandria Search

#85

Post by marginalia_nu »

amelius wrote: post #72
version_five wrote: post #30

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'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. Are there search benchmarks to be found somewhere? There must be. If you want to write a search engine, you need a way to validate the results.

There are benchmarks within the adjacent field of information retrieval, but in general it's hard to properly validate a search engine because real data is so noisy and misbehaved, and sample data is so different from real data.

Re: Alexandria Search

#86

Post by kreeben »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #85
amelius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious how people evaluate them quickly. Are there search benchmarks to be found somewhere? There must be. If you want to write a search engine, you need a way to validate the results.

There are benchmarks within the adjacent field of information retrieval, but in general it's hard to properly validate a search engine because real data is so noisy and misbehaved, and sample data is so different from real data.

Sure, the problem of information retrieval is not exactly that of web search but they're pretty close. So, from such a knowledgeable person such as yourself, when it comes to this topic, could you remind us, what are some of those benchmarks?

Re: Alexandria Search

#87

Post by josefcullhed »

Hello,

My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage.

We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Re: Alexandria Search

#88

Post by marginalia_nu »

kreeben wrote: post #86
marginalia_nu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are benchmarks within the adjacent field of information retrieval, but in general it's hard to properly validate a search engine because real data is so noisy and misbehaved, and sample data is so different from real data.

Sure, the problem of information retrieval is not exactly that of web search but they're pretty close. So, from such a knowledgeable person such as yourself, when it comes to this topic, could you remind us, what are some of those benchmarks?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall

For some standard corpus.

Re: Alexandria Search

#89

Post by kreeben »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #88
kreeben wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the problem of information retrieval is not exactly that of web search but they're pretty close. So, from such a knowledgeable person such as yourself, when it comes to this topic, could you remind us, what are some of those benchmarks?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall For some standard corpus.

>> Precision and recall

The phrase I was looking for. Thx a bunch! Gonna marginalia that now.

Re: Alexandria Search

#90

Post by kreeben »

josefcullhed wrote: post #87

Hello, My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage. We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Thanks for sharing this with the world. Did you manage to include all of a common crawl in an index? How long did that take you to produce such an index? Is your index in-memory or on disk?

I'd consider contributing. Seems you have something here.

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