What does it promise as an alternative to other search engines?
SearchHut
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Re: SearchHut
#72Tried 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…
You could say it's in the Garbage stage (though Garbage is a bit harsh for a product that is built in a week).
I didn't call the product garbage, just some of the results, which I think is fairly accurate. But I edited it to "useless" now, as that comes off as a bit less harsh.
Re: SearchHut
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's easily fixed by relying only on protected or high-profile pages. Those already deal (mostly successfully) with spam and NPOV violations on a daily basis, so piggybacking on those protection mechanisms should yield a fairly high-quality pool of curated external links.
While that sounds good in theory, who is to say those that can edit protected and high profile pages aren't in SEO spammers' pockets?
I mean the edit history is public and there's plenty of people that actually pay attention to edits and the like so they would be found out soon enough, but still.
I'm sure this is an ongoing discussion when e.g. political figures' pages are protected as well - who becomes the gatekeeper, and what is their political angle?
Re: SearchHut
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's easily fixed by relying only on protected or high-profile pages. Those already deal (mostly successfully) with spam and NPOV violations on a daily basis, so piggybacking on those protection mechanisms should yield a fairly high-quality pool of curated external links.
While that sounds good in theory, who is to say those that can edit protected and high profile pages aren't in SEO spammers' pockets? I mean the edit history is public and there's plenty of people that actually pay attention to edits and the like so they would be found out soon enough, but still. I'm sure this is an ongoing discussion when e.g. political figures' pages are protected as well - who becomes the gatekeep…
Sure, but at that point you're simply discussing Wikipedia's quality control system, which may be an interesting discussion, but has nothing to do with search engines per se.
Considering that Wikipedia has become a pillar of most scientific work (imagine writing a math or computer science paper without Wikipedia – utterly unthinkable), it's safe to say that knowledgeable people have collectively decided that its quality control mechanisms are "good enough", or at least better than those of any other resource of comparable depth and breadth.
And that puts Wikipedia's link pool leaps and bounds ahead of whatever dark magic current search engines are using, which mostly seems to be "funnel the entire web through some (easily gamed) heuristic".
Re: SearchHut
#75Many 404 not found.
It was not supposed to be released now, OP accidentally shared it here because of a misunderstanding.
Re: SearchHut
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not opposed to indexing GitHub, but the signal to noise ratio on GitHub is poor. Nearly all GitHub repositories are useless, so we'd have to filter most of it out. I think instead I'll have to set it up where people can request that specific interesting repositories are added to the index, and maybe crawl /explore to fill in a decent base set.
Perhaps all repo's that have a published package is a good heuristic. Then you'll at least get all the repos of npm, python and other packages.
Some interesting repos have no published packages. A combination of number of commits, stars and forks would be probably more relevant.
Re: SearchHut
#77Earlier 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…
I just tried searching for “python str” on searchhut and the top result is Postgres docs, then Wikipedia article for empty strings and then Drew’s blog. Official Python docs isn’t in the index at all.
Re: SearchHut
#78I hope Drew opens his own Google some day
Re: SearchHut
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
An answer box is the right thing for that query. (the web servers) The part that Google seem to have unfortunately skimmed over is that the answers need to be relevant, exact & correct.
It can certainly be a helpful feature, but I wonder whether it's really better than good, relevant search results presented in a readable way. For example I'd argue the manually curated infoboxes on Wikipedia are likely more reliable than the algorithmic versions Google shows in their results, especially as it's difficult to fix mistakes in Google's version. Google thinks their own solution is the best one because Google made it and so they circumvent the whole page ranking process. Some queries of course need more than just plain search results (see Semantic Web and related things) but for those most engines don't offer enough control and transparency.
But I'm glad people are trying to build alternatives. I'd love a search engine that ignores sites with antipatterns like required registration for any kind of usage, and this is the first step.
Re: SearchHut
#80In addition to curated domains list, some searches would benefit of limiting display of old results, as usually you might find an answer, but solved in jQuery or older version of framework you are using.