Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The world needs a non-profit search engine

daoudclarke.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 396 posts

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#101

Post by stormbrew »

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...

Honestly I think while this seems absurd if you're relatively knowledgeable about the internet, it's really not something that should be surprising or even particularly shameful? Like, why wouldn't they if it works, is easier to remember, and makes sense to them?

The reasons this is actually potentially bad are pretty deep in the internet wonk weeds, where you get into questions of gatekeepers and provinance of information and it shouldn't be surprising most people don't care about those things: those of us who do have failed to provide them with better tools.

On some level it's a little like saying "my dad sent me an email and he didn't use pgp! Can you believe it!??"

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#102

Post by guerrilla »

tgv wrote: post #58
guerrilla wrote: post #46

Please add it to [1] since Firefox (absurdly!) doesn't seem to let us add arbitrary search engines anymore. 1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/category...

It does, I just tried it with 102.1. You can add a "keyword" to use a search engine, and once you've done that, you can add it as a search engine to the url+search bar (the main one on top, I don't know how it's actually called) as well, and you can set it as your default search engine.

I mean I used to have that but I seem to now. Did it move? This is 102.0.

Edit: You can make a bookmark and add a keyword, but that doesn't help me use it as a search engine. It used to be you could just create one from the contextual menu, what is this convoluted process.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#103

Post by dotcoma »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #65
y42 wrote: post #9

I totally like the idea but I dare to doubt that this would solve the SEO problem. Website owners who are participating in those notorious affiliate programs or earn money with ads will still use the search engine to drag people onto their generic websites, using methodolgies to fit the search engines ranking mechanisms, no matter if they are public or not. SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system.

> SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system. I believe you mean 'inherent'.

And “its”, not “it’s”, while we are at it.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#105

Post by artificial »

nix23 wrote: post #97
kolinko wrote: post #90

Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines? Right now it is extremely difficult to build your own web crawler that would compete with Google. And that is not because of the technology, but because multiple sites will prevent your bot from accessing them if you're not Google or Bing - either through robo…

> Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines? That's a excellent idea! In the spirit of open-data, and people can do with it what they want.

I think this is a great idea. How does this work with copyright? Search engines seem to be able to download a reproduce content from scraped pages (and wrap it in ads, and derive content from it) this is called “indexing” when they do it but scraping when everyone else does it.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#106

Post by wizofaus »

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...

Yep, seen that repeatedly among anyone who's not fully tech savvy (I.e. most people). Just the way Google/MS/Apple like it, I imagine.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#107

Post by daoudc »

kolinko wrote: post #90

Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines? Right now it is extremely difficult to build your own web crawler that would compete with Google. And that is not because of the technology, but because multiple sites will prevent your bot from accessing them if you're not Google or Bing - either through robo…

The data is available! Not currently documented but check out the code for the API.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#108

Post by [deleted] »

kolinko wrote: post #90

Perhaps a better approach would be building an open source www index or even a full current cache - as an enabler for people to build their own search engines? Right now it is extremely difficult to build your own web crawler that would compete with Google. And that is not because of the technology, but because multiple sites will prevent your bot from accessing them if you're not Google or Bing - either through robo…

[deleted]

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#109

Post by jsmith99 »

I think Google's results could be a lot better but I'm relatively ok with my search being provided by a for profit company. Their incentive is to get me to want to use their product. A non profit with that much power might be more tempted to manipulate search in ways that suit their personal preferences.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#110

Post by mark_and_sweep »

lukeschwartz wrote: post #40
benrmatthews wrote: post #38

How is the name of the site pronounced? “Mah-wim-ball”? Google’s name was so ubiquitous it became a verb, Duck Duck Go is a smart memorable name. Mwmbl is a challenging product name, even if the .org domain name was available.

https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl#frequently-asked-question

Why not call it Mumble then?

I was also confused by the name. That's not necessarily a good first impression.

Post reply on HN