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Alexandria Search

alexandria.org

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Re: Alexandria Search

#171

Post by rg111 »

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.

I have been using Kagi since it was introduced here on HN.

I find it absolutely great to use.

I find its results to be of much better quality than Google.

Google search shows a lot of SEOd results which are absolutely horrible in quality, filled with Adsense ads, and have Amazon affiliate links in them.

Kagi is a breath of fresh air for me.

I also use You.com sometimes. When I am exploring something for the first time, you.com is my place to go. It gives one a good lay of the land which is missing from others.

I still find Google to be the best for looking up code syntax, simple solutions and so on.

But when I am looking for something that depends on opinion, I find Kagi to show much better results and not SEO vomit. (When one wants direct facts even Bing is sufficient.)

On some days my Kagi usage surpasses my Google usage.

Re: Alexandria Search

#174

Post by marginalia_nu »

kreeben wrote: post #114
josefcullhed wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are currently just doing an intersection and then we make a lookup in a forward index to get the urls, titles and snippets. I actually don't know what roaring bitmaps are, please enlighten me :)

If you are solely supporting union or solely supporting intersection then roaring bitmaps is probably not a perfect solution to any of your problems. There are some algorithms that have been optimized for intersect, union, remove (OR, AND, NOT) that work extremely well for sorted lists but the problem is usually: how to efficiently sort the lists that you wish to perform boolean operations on, so that you can then ap…

Roaring Bitmaps are awesome. I use them when merging indices. I need to know which items to keep from the old index, so I'm calculating the intersection between two sets of a cardinality around 500,000,000. Without breaking a sweat.

Re: Alexandria Search

#175

Post by foobarandlmj »

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.

hello, so i was studying B+ trees today, you see, in the morning i browsed hackernews and saw alexandria.org, opened the tab, kept it open, went about my day, got frustrated with my search results, noticed the alexandria tab and tried it, every result was meaningful, well done .

Re: Alexandria Search

#176

Post by vivekraghunatha »

chris123 wrote: post #64
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'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.

(Founder of Neeva here) -- Chris -- I love the idea. Neeva does this in a contextually relevant manner to the intent of the query. For example, on health queries, we label all health sites as "trusted", "ad-supported" etc. and allow you to filter down to the appropriate subset of results. For programming queries, we label sites as "official sites", "forums", "blogs", "code repos", "programming websites" (the SEO-ed ones). We work with human raters to do this. Would love to hear if you find it useful and what other labels would be of use.

Re: Alexandria Search

#177

Post by vivekraghunatha »

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.

(Founder of Neeva) Eval for search engines is about as hard as ranking for search engines. You need rating templates, raters, querysets, tooling and lots of time and patience. There are a number of vendors who can help you with the raters part, but the rest is still painstaking work you have to do yourself. Email me if you need help; we are happy to share findings.

Re: Alexandria Search

#178

Post by vivekraghunatha »

ffhhj wrote: post #55
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.…

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

(Founder of Neeva here) I'd love for you to try us (www.neeva.com) and tell us what you think ... (either here or via the support button on the SRP)

Re: Alexandria Search

#179

Post by Seirdy »

IvanHall wrote: post #165
Seirdy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, I have too many questions. I'd appreciate any answers you're able/willing to give: 1. Do you have any plans to support the parsing of any additional metadata (e.g. semantic HTML, microformats, schema.org structured data, open graph, dublin core, etc)? 2. How do you plan to address duplicate content? Engines like Google and Bing filter out pages containing the same content, which is welcome due to the amount o…

Hello, Ivan here (the other founder). 1. Yes, any structured data could definitely help improve the results, I personally like the Wikidata dataset. It's just a matter of time and resources :) 2. The first step will probably be to handle this in our "post processing". We query several servers when doing a search and often get many more results than we need and in this step we could quite easily remove identical resul…

> Yes, any structured data could definitely help improve the results

Which syntaxes and vocabularies do you prefer? microformats, as well as schema.org vocabs represented Microdata or JSON-LD, seem to be the most common acc to the latest Web Data Commons Extraction Report[0]. The report is also powered by the Common Crawl.

[0]: http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2021-12/stats/stats...

Re: Alexandria Search

#180

Post by danuker »

Seirdy wrote: post #141
danuker wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox uses a custom format for compressing the SEARCH ENGINES. I am appalled. I had to do a `pip install lz4` then apply and run this change: https://gist.github.com/Tblue/62ff47bef7f894e92ed5?permalink... And it did not work. I hit a brick wall. I completely lost trust in Firefox. I want a browser created by a non-profit. Thank you Google for corrupting everything you touch. I then found this blessed soul: https:/…

Some of these (Andi, nee Lazyweb; You; SwissCows) are Bing proxies. Gnod is a search launcher, not an engine unto itself. Many more installable engines are available at https://mycroftproject.com as OpenSearch XML plugins, compatible with Firefox and discoverable by Chromium.

Thanks! I will remove duplicates.
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