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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

#281
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 not my idea - Googles from Brave is something to look into, don't know entirely how it works - but it's in this direction.

Goggles

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the thought of adding a "yellowlist" funny, as some people are starting to find the use of "whitelist" and "blacklist" racist.

It would be more consistent to call it greenlist, yellowlist, redlist then.

How dare you, some of my best friends identify as traffic lights.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#283
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.

I recently made a tool to create Brave Goggles using subreddits as a signal source. I already use a netsec goggle for daily searching.

https://github.com/forcesunseen/narwhalizer

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#284
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The steps I took were: 1. Go to kagi.com 2. Right-click on the search field and choose "Add a keyword for this search..." 3. Fill in the keyword (e.g. kagi, as I did) 4. Right click in the top url+search field, and choose "Add Kagi search" Now you can search via keyword, you can change to kagi while typing, and you can set the default search engine to kagi in the preferences.

Thanks. Apparently, it works fine for Kagi but not for mwmbl.org (from the article.) I foolishly didn't try a different search engine :P

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#285

Honestly, the easy part is building a search engine, like just document retrieval stuff and domain ranking, SEO-mitigation etc. Anyone can build a Google '98 and get it to work well, not that hard, doesn't require all too much hardware. I have done that and got one running out of my living room. The tricky part, if you want people to use your search engine for more than the novelty factor, and what most Google compet…

I agree, the whole package is the difference. I'm trying to use DDG as much as possible, but I live in Italy and for local stuff Google services are still unbeatable. E.g. Apple Maps used by DDG are a no go where a live for all but plain directions. OSM data used by many map apps is good, non commercial data sometimes even better than GMaps, but businesses data is only on GMaps, there's no way around that.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#286
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?

That’s a first world problem. The big problem is becoming successful.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#287
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?

Authorship attribution AI's

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#288
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget they also have a very popular browser that itself collects and bundles back home a lot of usage infomation from most of its user base: https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/16/wonder-about-the-data-goog...

I think this is a bit misleading. Chrome gets access to various data to enable various features -- for example to pass your location to the website (when you allow it to do so). Browsing history is used e.g. to power URL auto-completion. This doesn't mean that this data can be used to inform Google Search ranking. That would be very shady and potentially illegal. I work for Google, and even though I do not work speci…

I'd be surprised if they don't have the capability to enable "linger time" statistics that collate frequency of new web site loads, memory demands, etc for performance.

This relates to the "how can they know how long I look at a web site for" asked above - if not specifically they do at least know the answer stochastically.

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#289
post #251

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.

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

A quick, entirely unrepresentative look at the user count for uBlock Origin and uBlacklist in Firefox make me somewhat less optimistic than you are. Or is there a more popular way of blocking sites from search results than uBlacklist out there, which I simply don't know about?

Re: The world needs a non-profit search engine

#290
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?

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.

In 2005 I had an open source project doing this that turned into a venture backed company.

See: http://getoutfoxed.com/node/46

Some approach like this could still work, but it’s incredibly hard to maintain/define the right “network”, and across different domains. (E.g. HN probably not so good a community for latest fashions or sports trivia)

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