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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

#251

Post by Brybry »

slazaro wrote: post #200
nonameking2026 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

99%+ of people wouldn't use this, they would just try the search engine, see that the results suck, then stop using it. It could be useful for power users, though.

20% to 40% of internet users use an adblocker depending on whose statistics you use.[1][2][3]

SEO is basically another form of advertising, so evidence suggests to me that people would use something like this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking#:~:text=users

[2] https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-ad-blockers/

[3] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/ad-blocking

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#252

Post by np1810 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #229
kreeben wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would, if what you say were to make a whole lot of sense, otherwise, no. You know how it works here. We would strip you of your internet points if you start being nonsensical.

I think you are kind of ignoring the issue that parent brought up. The hn machine is not all that smart and can easily be gamed, and would, if the stakes were to become high enough. Farming hn karma by making pointed statements on crowd favorites (parent named two, oss licensing or privacy also spring to mind) gets you your 10k, no originality or honesty required, in no time. What's protecting hn is a lot of moderati…

Anything (points/karma/coins) which is free & unlimited will find it's way to get exploited. "What if" there's a barter system for karma/points, you do a +1 and get a -1.

Though I do not know how the initial allotment of karma/points could be distributed for the pioneers and for the new growing community, maybe allot 'n' points for new user after a year...

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#253

Post by nonameking2026 »

mhoad wrote: post #232
nonameking2026 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love how this is a problem that a huge number of people have worked on for around 20 years and have thrown stupid amounts of money at and people just jump in and boldly proclaim that they have the answers that just popped into their mind. Peak HackerNews.

But not my idea - Googles from Brave is something to look into, don't know entirely how it works - but it's in this direction.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#255

Post by april_22 »

christophilus wrote: post #239
slazaro wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99%+ of people wouldn't use this, they would just try the search engine, see that the results suck, then stop using it. It could be useful for power users, though.

Add a thumbs up / down icon, and your average Facebook user would likely use it without knowing what it was.

More and more search engines are now giving you the option to customize search results. Brave has Goggles, You.com has thumbs up / down icon and other alternative search engines have similiar capabilites too. I have been really enjoying the ability to tailor my search to how I like it and e.g. rank reddit (although it seems like it is not liked by some folks here) higher.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#256

Post by chris_f »

Worth mentioning is the Alexandria.org project [0]. It is a non-profit search engine built on data from Common Crawl. The coverage is limited because of Common Crawl, but the relevance is decent. They also provide an API.

I believe one of the biggest impacts toward breaking up Google's monopoly on search is making them open up access to their index, even requiring Google to provide direct API search access for others to build alternative search products. They have a search API today, but it is prohibitively expensive to build on ($5/1000 calls).

I built a fairly popular search engine a couple years back, but the cost of Google's search API and increasing number of bot attacks make it difficult to reason keeping it online.

[0] https://www.alexandria.org/

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#257

Post by mhoad »

_abox wrote: post #240
mhoad wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how this is a problem that a huge number of people have worked on for around 20 years and have thrown stupid amounts of money at and people just jump in and boldly proclaim that they have the answers that just popped into their mind. Peak HackerNews.

But a company like Google would want supreme control. They're not inclined to rely on a community for anything Wikipedia shows it can work at scale.

Google have actually followed a similar model for like ten years now with like 10,000 temp workers following this 172 manual to essentially as the basis to train a lot of their ranking models.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#259

Post by amelius »

rocketbop wrote: post #203
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.

Personally I don't ask my network or friends for options on such things because people tend to have a positive bias towards things we have invested money in. Interestingly summarized on a Lifehacker some time ago. https://lifehacker.com/the-psychology-of-a-fanboy-why-you-ke... I like my friends but I don't want to get my news or politics or shopping advice from them.

The question is: is that worse than the advice from marketeers?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#260

Post by naillo »

With all the great progress in large language models lately, and them being excellent text compressors, I've started to wonder if you couldn't just replace a search engine with a like 100mb file full of weights that let you query essentially google scale results except all locally.
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