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SearchHut

searchhut.org

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Re: SearchHut

#31

Post by p-e-w »

mda wrote: post #22
p-e-w wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are going to rely on domain-level reputation then your search engine is going to be way behind the search engines that can judge content more specifically, which is all of the other search engines. Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries? "All of the other search engines" have completely failed to keep pages from the results that are not only low-quality, but outright spam.

They definitely do not return "90% garbage for most queries". This 8s an unsubstantiated claim I see often i HN and honestly not backed by any real data. e.g. You can check your search history and see it yourself.

I just tried searching for "python str" on Google. I expected the top result to be a link to the official Python docs for the `str` type, then ideally some relevant StackOverflow questions highlighting common Python issues with strings, bytes, Unicode etc.

Instead, the top result was W3Schools. Then came the Python docs, then 5 pages somewhere between blogspam and poor-quality tutorials. Then a ReadTheDocs page dating to 2015. And that was it. No more official Python resources, no StackOverflow. In the middle of the results some worthless "Google Q&A" dropdowns that lead to more garbage quality content.

So for this query, using my definition of "garbage", the "garbage percentage" is somewhere between 80% and 90+%, depending on how many Q&A dropdowns you waste your time opening.

Re: SearchHut

#32

Post by p-e-w »

birken wrote: post #25
p-e-w wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are going to rely on domain-level reputation then your search engine is going to be way behind the search engines that can judge content more specifically, which is all of the other search engines. Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries? "All of the other search engines" have completely failed to keep pages from the results that are not only low-quality, but outright spam.

> Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries? If you can give me a list of 10 normal-ish queries where 9 out of the first 10 results on Google or DDG are "garbage", then I'll concede your point. I think you are creating an impossible standard for search engines, then using it to deem the current ones as failures. While at the same time ignoring that this new search engine is, as present, un…

See my reply on the sibling comment for an illustrative example.

Re: SearchHut

#34

Post by jwilk »

p-e-w wrote: post #31
mda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely do not return "90% garbage for most queries". This 8s an unsubstantiated claim I see often i HN and honestly not backed by any real data. e.g. You can check your search history and see it yourself.

I just tried searching for "python str" on Google. I expected the top result to be a link to the official Python docs for the `str` type, then ideally some relevant StackOverflow questions highlighting common Python issues with strings, bytes, Unicode etc. Instead, the top result was W3Schools. Then came the Python docs, then 5 pages somewhere between blogspam and poor-quality tutorials. Then a ReadTheDocs page datin…

For me, https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html is the top result.

Re: SearchHut

#36

Post by mormegil »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I like the idea of searching a curated list of domains, but I'm not sure that doing the curation yourself is the best approach considering the huge number of useful but niche websites in existence. I wonder if simply parsing all of Wikipedia (dumps are available, and so are parsers capable of handling them) and building a list of all domains used in external links would do the trick. Wikipedia already has substantial…

Oh, and more to the point: This is a role Wikipedia explicitly renounced, isn't it. When it became so big and the Google PageRank gave it high importance, the spam became unbearable so Wikipedia decided it needs to change the incentives and it applied the rel=nofollow to all external links, so that it could stop working as an unpaid manual spam filter for the whole internet. Sure, your new search might ignore the rel=nofollow but if you ever become big enough, the incentives of spammers would lead to a bigger spamming pressure on Wikipedia...

Re: SearchHut

#37

Post by alpaca128 »

charcircuit wrote: post #18

>What's the most popular web server SearchHut: The first result is django which is not the most popular web server. Google: Shows an answer box with the market share of various web servers.

Considering Google's answer box randomly picked multiple photos of unrelated people as pictures of murderers and rape victims (with Google being very uncooperative about resolving the issue) I'd say the lack of an answer box might not be that bad.

Re: SearchHut

#38

Post by Beltalowda »

Tried a few things:

- Beltalowda – no results (for reference: it's a term to refer to "people from the [asteroid] belt" used in the The Expanse books and TV series).

- The Expanse – bunch of results, but none are what I'm looking for (the TV series or books). It looks like it may drop the "the" in there?

- Star Trek – a bunch of results, but ordered very curiously; the first is the Wikipedia page for "Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual", and lots of pages like "Weapons in Star Trek" and such.

- NGC 3623 – lists "Messier object" and "Messier 65", in that order, which is somewhat wrong as NGC 3623 refers to Messier 65 specifically.

- NGC3623 (same as previous, but without a space) – no results.

- vim map key – pretty useless results, most of which have no bearing on Vim at all, much less mapping keys in Vim.

- python print list – the same; The Go type parameters proposal is the first result; automake the second, etc.

Conclusion: "this product is experimental and incomplete" is an understatement.

Re: SearchHut

#40

Post by 12907835202 »

mormegil wrote: post #28
p-e-w wrote: post #13

I like the idea of searching a curated list of domains, but I'm not sure that doing the curation yourself is the best approach considering the huge number of useful but niche websites in existence. I wonder if simply parsing all of Wikipedia (dumps are available, and so are parsers capable of handling them) and building a list of all domains used in external links would do the trick. Wikipedia already has substantial…

The "official website" links can be retrieved in a machine-readable way from Wikidata. E.g. a completely random silly example of official websites of embassies: https://w.wiki/5T3R

Is there documentation for rolling your own?

I've been considering building my own search engine for a while for my niche topic which has I can't tell how useful this will be but it'd be fun to give it a go.

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