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The next Google

dkb.io

541–550 of 561 posts

Re: The next Google

#541
Neeva's similarity search is very useful. It takes a page and creates a query from it (oversimplified, actually a document based k-nearest-neighbors) then executes the query. This feature used to be in Google but they removed it, not used enough I guess. Neeva has very limited ways to use this.

Here's wishing for this in all search!

Re: The next Google

#542
post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The initial statement sounded exactly like the armchair "experts" one so often encounters. Maybe - but [marginalia_nu]( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=marginalia_nu ) isn't an armchair expert - they've actually implemented theor own publically available search engine - which is linked in their profile.

I didn't say they are. Only that the initial comment sounded like that. And in the thread above we discussed a bit about their achievements. I really liked it and learned a lot.

I'm certainly not so full of myself to demand some sort of special treatment on the Internet :P

Re: The next Google

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I was editing the comment while you were replying. Sorry about that. I was just adding to it though, didn't really rug pull on your response so I think it's fine. > What qualifies? What defines signal, what noise? I agree, that a lot (probably nearly all) pages will receive very, very little traffic/search requests. But are these therefore not relevant? Now this is a proper difficult problem with (probably) f…

> I [...] didn't really rug pull on your response so I think it's fine. No you didn't. All good. And I learned a lot from the extended answer. So I am thankful for the explanation. > Developing heuristics for this is a bit of a hobby horse of mine. It feels tantalizingly almost doable with just a little bit more resources and time than I have. I can totally understand the feeling. There are quite a few things that I'…

> May I ask how you decide to add me content? Do you follow links? Do you use other search engines' results as a starting point?

I initially did basically a DFS-walk originating at a few websites I liked, with some filtering criteria that deprioritized websites that didn't look too interesting. Now that I have a fairly comprehensive mapping of the space I want to index, I use a few factors like frequent outbound links from highly ranking domains to inform which new sites to index.

> I could probably shoot many more questions, but don't want to be a nuisance.

No worry, I love to talk about this stuff.

Re: The next Google

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gave it another try with "ssh scp". Google's first result explains me how to use scp (ssh provides a hint about the context), which was what i would be looking for. Marganilla... not so much it seems

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scp&profile=yolo&j... tho

The second hit links to a man page of scp. It is a formal description of the syntax, not what I was looking for... I'd rather have a short intro and a few examples of typical usage instead, am I being pedantic? If i wanted a formal description i would google 'scp cli', 'scp options' or even 'man scp'. Also, on a tangent, to be honest -- I find searching simply for 'scp' not a very clever approach. How did Marginalia guess it would be the cli tool and not one of the other acronyms?

Re: The next Google

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scp&profile=yolo&j... tho

The second hit links to a man page of scp. It is a formal description of the syntax, not what I was looking for... I'd rather have a short intro and a few examples of typical usage instead, am I being pedantic? If i wanted a formal description i would google 'scp cli', 'scp options' or even 'man scp'. Also, on a tangent, to be honest -- I find searching simply for 'scp' not a very clever approach. How did Marginalia…

Yeah that's not the sort of search engine this is. If you search for SCP, it will show you documents where that term is relevant, using domain ranking as a tiebreaker. It's quite intentionally not trying to read your mind.

I think it showed the man page first because that domain is highly ranked.

Re: The next Google

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is trust networks. Where you trust a number of friends, who trust other people, etc. and you can use a matrix of trust to retrieve review scores, etc. Imagine trusting HN, visiting Amazon and getting all the reviews from other HN users ...

"Trust networks" are literally the past, that's literally how humanity has worked ever since its inception

history rhymes

Re: The next Google

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine a commenter in a walled garden complaining about the walled garden's audience. "Facebook's audience is extremely skewed toward..., but that's not what...." How long before some Facebook reader asks, "Then why are you using it?" If one dislikes systems that allow tinkering then why read and comment on HN. I do not understand.

I'm not sure who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering.

Apparently "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering. Presumably "the market" refers to some people who said they dislike systems that allow tinkering. Either that or the commenter is inferring "the market" dislikes systems that allow tinkering even though no person has actually made a statement to that effect.

Maybe HN is not the ideal forum for discussions of "the market" (due to lack of interest and/or understanding), but maybe HN is a decent forum for discussing systems that allow tinkering.

Re: The next Google

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a simple box where you put a question in and it gives you answers Google is very good at this, but this is exactly what I _don't_ want in the "Next Google". I want a _search engine_ for the web, not an answers engine that tries to know what I want better than I do. Search the web. Give me links to websites. This seems obvious to me, but everyone is trying to be like Google. I'm convinced the death of the web and in…

The death of the web is because most people don't want what you want. They don't mind walled gardens, so long as they are easy to use and have the content and connections that they want to see. The audience of HN is extremely skewed towards preferring systems that allow tinkering but that's not what the market wants.

> Most people don’t want what you want

This is absolutely true; however there are riches in niches.

The % of internet users who want X probably is lower, but I’d gander the absolute number of people who would want something like this is much bigger than it was a decade ago.

This community forgets that because we’re told by investors, the media we read, etc. to go after the biggest markets possible. “Hunt for elephants, not field mice,” they say.

Don’t forget that a niche market on the web can still be massive and small fortunes can be made building products and services for them. You might not even need to have investors on your cap table to bring products to market to sell to those niches if you know what you’re doing, but shhhh… don’t tell them I told you that.

Re: The next Google

#550

I just went on a mini vacation to Vegas, and was thinking how nice it would be to just call up someone and ask for some simple advice. I did a bunch of online research before I booked things, but man was it painful. There are so many copy-cat blogs who just throw together a bunch of basic information with no real research done in order to get those clicks/adwords. For example: best hotel pool in vegas. Seems simple e…

I find reddit works remarkably well for this. I've gotten great actionable recommendations within an hour or two for: - good coffeeshops - tacos - Korean grocery stores - places that have traditional style al pastor tacos - finding a specific coffee brand at a local grocery store - finding EDM songs similar to a particular song (dullscythe) - hot chicken - canolis and a bunch more similar things. I would think if you…

And reddit works because it's not an algorithm that decides which post is good, it's people with upvotes. And that in turn can be used by search engines.

Maybe that's what would fix Google. Up&down-votes for web results. Would probably be the easiest way to penalize bad sites and promote good niche pages. But after they removed downvoting in Youtube, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

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