41–50 of 161 posts
But it passes tests that are very important for me:
1) It's fully accessible by Tor. No CAPTCHAs or "We don't serve your kind in here" messages.
2) It works in a text browser without JavaScript and renders in a sensible way without style requirements.
10/10 for accessibility. Something Google and other search engines could learn from.
I went ahead and polished up the announcement for an early release:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-07-15-searchhut/
Let me know if you have any questions!
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…
> SearchHut indexes from a curated set of domains. The quality of results is higher as a result, but the index covers a small subset of the web. [citation needed] The quality of the results right now are not very high, and in theory I don't understand why one would believe a search engine with a hand picked set of domains would be expected to outcompete a search engine that can crawl the entire web and determines rep…
Because SEO manipulation is a well developed field, ensuring that the search engines trying to determine reputation automatically will (and does) end up with bad results.
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…
>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.
>> https://searchhut.org/about/domains => 404
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Good morning, HN. Please note that SearchHut is not done or in a presentable state right now, and those who were in the know were asked not to share it. Alas. I had planned to announce this next week, after we had more time to build up a bigger index, add more features, fix up the 404's and stub pages, do more testing, and so on, so if you notice any rough edges, this is why. I went ahead and polished up the announce…
e.g. "Any websites engaging in SEO spam are rejected from the index" - how is determined whether something is SEO spam or not? More clarification of whats allowed/not allowed would be nice!
> SearchHut indexes from a curated set of domains. The quality of results is higher as a result, but the index covers a small subset of the web. [citation needed] The quality of the results right now are not very high, and in theory I don't understand why one would believe a search engine with a hand picked set of domains would be expected to outcompete a search engine that can crawl the entire web and determines rep…
> why one would believe a search engine with a hand picked set of domains would be expected to outcompete a search engine that can crawl the entire web and determines reputation by itself. Because SEO manipulation is a well developed field, ensuring that the search engines trying to determine reputation automatically will (and does) end up with bad results.