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The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

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Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#21

Post by 6510 »

dmje wrote: post #14

He's doing that thing [1] where's he's writing about a thing and presumably wants me - the interested reader - to know more about that thing because it's the thing he's spending all his time on, but he gives zero navigational options to his thing. So as that interested reader, it's down to me to find the name of his thing [Mwmbl] and then (hilariously, given the context!) use a search engine (probably The Evil Google…

I use to run a script on a blog that replaced a few thousand words and word combinations with links to the evil that shall not be named.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#22

Post by orangepanda »

TheChaplain wrote: post #11
irrational wrote: post #6

I use duck duck go. Recently someone showed me their screen where they were using google to do a search. I was absolutely aghast. The last time I used google when you searched for something you saw a simple text list of sites (which is how DDG still works). Instead the google results were… a disaster. You had to scroll through some much garbage before finding actual search results - a list of sites. It was like googl…

I have family members who use google to navigate. Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...

I do that. Mostly because I never remember if it was .com or .net or .dog or .io or whatever else cute tld

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#25

Post by tyropita »

Quite a neat way to crawl websites using a browser extension. That by itself is a form of donation to the search engine. Maybe in the future you can have dedicated software for self-hosted clients that users can run to crawl and index websites for mwmbl? Kinda like folding@home.

How are the batches of URLs to be crawled generated/discovered and posted at your API?

How do you deal with duplicate crawls?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#26

Post by thatwasunusual »

tyropita wrote: post #25

Quite a neat way to crawl websites using a browser extension. That by itself is a form of donation to the search engine. Maybe in the future you can have dedicated software for self-hosted clients that users can run to crawl and index websites for mwmbl? Kinda like folding@home. How are the batches of URLs to be crawled generated/discovered and posted at your API? How do you deal with duplicate crawls?

I have also thought that distributed crawling with the help of browser extensions, and/or clients like folding@home, could be a good idea. But how to deal with "spam injections"?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#27

Post by eterevsky »

> Google tries to work out which sites are interesting by how long you spend on the site.

How would Google know how long you spend on the site? It only sees what links you clicked and doesn't know what happens next. (Unless the website uses Analytics, but Analytics doesn't affect search ranking.)

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#28

Post by 6510 »

ffguuficc wrote: post #17
TheChaplain wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have family members who use google to navigate. Instead of writing facebook.com in the URL-bar, they search for facebook and click the first link...

Honestly that is probably safer. Having a typo in the url could Easley give you a phishing link. However, I also have gotten fishing adds when looking websites up so it’s not cut and dry at all.

For a good while if one searched for a (Dutch) gov institution or business google shows you the (free to call) phone number as a clickable link but the anchor has a different link to a paid per minute redirecting service. I know plenty of people who found the weird 15-50 euro entry on their bill.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#29

Post by dmje »

daoudc wrote: post #16
dmje wrote: post #14

He's doing that thing [1] where's he's writing about a thing and presumably wants me - the interested reader - to know more about that thing because it's the thing he's spending all his time on, but he gives zero navigational options to his thing. So as that interested reader, it's down to me to find the name of his thing [Mwmbl] and then (hilariously, given the context!) use a search engine (probably The Evil Google…

That word (Mwmbl) is actually a link, but I think the link colour is not different enough from the text. Let me see what I can do.

IMO you also need an about page. Why are you doing this? Who are you? Why should the world pay attention? And stick them in your navigation. Overstate your cause rather than assume that people will get it. It's a rad product you're making! Don't undersell yourself! :-)

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#30

Post by IshKebab »

eterevsky wrote: post #27

> Google tries to work out which sites are interesting by how long you spend on the site. How would Google know how long you spend on the site? It only sees what links you clicked and doesn't know what happens next. (Unless the website uses Analytics, but Analytics doesn't affect search ranking.)

They know if you click a result then 10 seconds later click a different result.
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