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

181–190 of 396 posts

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#181

Post by jefftk »

Flashtoo wrote: post #129
bosie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and wrap it in ads, and derive content from it i am probably missing something but can you give an example where this happens?

E.g. on Google if you search for "how to tie a tie", a little info box may pop up with step by step instructions. This content is taken from some website, but that website gets no page hits or ad revenue. Instead, Google gets to serve ads on the search engine results page. (I don't know if this happens for this specific example, but Google does this for some searches)

> that website gets no page hits

Part of why sites participate in the infobox program is that in practice you do get quite a lot of hits from it: many people click through to see the answer in context.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#182

Post by amelius »

sevazhidkov wrote: post #174
amelius wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google search is using the wrong approach. When I'm looking for e.g. a new camera, I want to use my network which I trust . E.g. I want to ask "what camera would HN recommend?" We should think more about how we can use trust as a basis for how we explore the internet.

Given that enough people use this heuristic, there will be companies focusing on earning karma on HN, writing comments and voting for products they are getting paid for.

Trust can work both ways. They'd have to be really careful to not lose the earned trust. On the way, they would have to write a lot of high quality HN posts. I'd say this model is a win over current spamming and fake reviewing practices.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#183

Post by leobg »

A recent comment here mentioned search in early browsers (1991ish). The browser would fetch all links from the current page n levels deep in the background and uses that to build a local index.

I wonder if something like that could work today, only with the index being shared across the user base.

The benefit would be that it’s a decentralized system. No giant infrastructure required which needs to be paid for by a big corporation. Basically, the infrastructure needs would be outsourced to millions of devices. And for websites, users and crawlers would be the same thing. Which is to say, you cannot block one without also blocking the other.

It could also add feedback mechanisms. Active ones, such as commenting on pages and discussing them, as we do on HN. But also passive ones such as tracking how long the user interacted with the page, to score the value of pages/domains and improve the ranking algorithm.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#184

Post by bsenftner »

larsrc wrote: post #155

Disclaimer: I work for Google, though far away from Search. Regardless of search engine design, there's HUGE money in SEO. Any successful search engine will be gamed. Do you have the developer power to go red-queen against all the large companies in the world?

Actually, it is entire possible to create search criteria that cannot be gamed. That is what Google Research's various arms ought to be working on. But we all know if is far more profitable to have a manipulatable system.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#185

Post by vineyardmike »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #7
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…

ads. SEO. i have a guy in digital marketing tell me that his friend does SEO and he does wonders with obscure keywords and shit. that friend is a freelancer and earns a good payday. When you want to insert your brand in every fucking imaginative keyword as opposed to people "searching for something", why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING…

> why does internet advertising revolve around everyone assuming every person googling something "WANTS TO BUY SOMETHING"?

Rather I think it’s because everyone who buys ads has something to sell.

Search ads are “direct action”. You click a link to do something. Ads on eg. TV are more about “brand memory” - reminding you they exist. When you watch tv you’re passively taking in information, but when you’re searching you’re actively trying to click something already. It’s a better fit behaviorally.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#186

Post by kevincox »

closedloop129 wrote: post #139
kolinko wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bombing is one thing, but you also have a whole SEO industry now that will exploit any way possible to get to the top of the rankings. The moment you have community rankings on search, and your search gets popular, you land in a war zone with bots trying to mangle those. Reddit is kind of good dealing with that, but it is very resource intensive.

What if you limit accounts to real people and then keep track of their credibility? It's some initial effort but how could the ranking be manipulated when all dishonest people have burned their credibility?

I've always wondered if you could combat via referal-only sites. To get in you need to achir your humanness on someone else's account. If an account is found to invite too many spammers, robots, or otherwise it is banned or disallowed to invite more accounts.

I'm sure you could still manage to make "fake" accounts but it would be much more difficult, and linking them together would be much easier.

Of course starting a site like this would be very difficult. But maybe you could start without it then add it in once you get to a decent popularity such that many people can find a referral if they need to.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#188

Post by kevincox »

norman784 wrote: post #54
mattrick wrote: post #34

One feature that I really wish more search engines would have is the ability to blocklist certain domains, particularly ones whose results are never relevant or helpful to the query itself (Pinterest, Quora, etc). It could even be used as a factor in the site’s search rankings.

I think kagi does that, I use while was in beta, you also can assign a priority to sites, like normal or boost. Kagi is a paid service and doesn’t shows you ads.

It does. This is one of the best features.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#189

Post by nonameking2026 »

larsrc wrote: post #155

Disclaimer: I work for Google, though far away from Search. Regardless of search engine design, there's HUGE money in SEO. Any successful search engine will be gamed. Do you have the developer power to go red-queen against all the large companies in the world?

Allow users to blacklist sites. Share blacklisted sites. Have the option of instead of hiding blacklisted sites entirely - show them in a different column.

Have 4 different types of list.

Whitelist - highest scoring

Not listed - these websites are not ranked.

Yellowlist - show but keep in a separate column

Blacklist - don't show

https://search.brave.com/help/goggles is interesting.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#190

Post by blowski »

kreeben wrote: post #180
sevazhidkov wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that enough people use this heuristic, there will be companies focusing on earning karma on HN, writing comments and voting for products they are getting paid for.

Wouldn't the world become a little bit better if they did? Earning karma on HN is not the easiest thing. I would hate to speak for all of us but collectively, don't you think we have a pretty good marketspeak alert system here?

I’ve got 10k karma by making pithy criticisms of Node.js and Kubernetes. Do you therefore trust my opinions on US healthcare?
Post reply on HN