Live data from Hacker News

SearchHut

searchhut.org

141–150 of 161 posts

Re: SearchHut

#141

Earlier 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.

GitHub is hella tricky to crawl too due to its sheer size and single entry point (meaning slow crawl speed). I've been looking at the problem as well, and so far just ignored it as un-crawlable, but I might do something like crawl only the about pages for repos that are linked to externally some time in the future.

There's an asterisk to that: they serve the underlying content through two different APIs so one can side-step the HTML wrapper around the bytes: the discovery phase has a formal API (both REST and GraphQL) for finding repos, and then the in-repo content can be git-cloned and one can locally index every branch, commit, and blob, without issuing hundreds of thousands of http requests to GH. One would still need to hit GH for the issues, if that's in scope, but it'd be way less http requests unless your repo is named kubernetes or terraform.

Re: SearchHut

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's our strategy at you.com - we start with the most popular sites, crawl them and build apps for them, eg. you.com/apps and let users vote in search results. Full disclosure: I'm the CEO.

Your search actually performed better than Google for me on a random query. I queried both engines "What is the specific heat of alcohol?", Google threw up a rich search answer that linked to some random Mexican site that is clearly exploiting SEO [1], you.com linked me to answers.com (which is more trustworthy than random mexican website). [1]: http://elempresario.mx/sites/default/files/scith/specific-he...

When I search Google I get a rich search answer of http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/sphtt.html

Re: SearchHut

#143

Too bad this came out before Drew intended, and I hope that after having a weekend to rest he’ll feel his motivation recover. One meta-thought, I think projects like this are surfacing something interesting: The underlying technology to make a pretty good search engine is no longer especially difficult for programmers or for server. This is potentially a very good thing, as it means the end of the Google era. I can i…

What Google has is marketing and momentum... its the ubiquitous search engine.

Google also funnels a lot of traffic to itself through Chrome's search bar, and Firefox does the same. Sure you can replace the search engine, but whatever you replace it with needs to have the same capabilities or the entire model falls apart. Meanwhile, alternative means of navigating the web (such as bookmarks) are made increasingly difficult to access, requiring multiple clicks.

I don't mean to be conspiratorial, I'm sure there are good intentions behind this, the consequence however is effectively locking in Google as the default gateway for the Internet.

Re: SearchHut

#144

I'm not a fan of google but you can do exactly what this search engine does by curating your own list of domains to search against. https://programmablesearchengine.google.com

For those looking for an alternative to that, I've been building a self-hosted search engine that crawls what you want based on a basic set of rules. It can be a list of domains, a very specific list of URLs, and/or even some basic regexes.

https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass

Re: SearchHut

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is hella tricky to crawl too due to its sheer size and single entry point (meaning slow crawl speed). I've been looking at the problem as well, and so far just ignored it as un-crawlable, but I might do something like crawl only the about pages for repos that are linked to externally some time in the future.

There's an asterisk to that: they serve the underlying content through two different APIs so one can side-step the HTML wrapper around the bytes: the discovery phase has a formal API (both REST and GraphQL) for finding repos, and then the in-repo content can be git-cloned and one can locally index every branch, commit, and blob, without issuing hundreds of thousands of http requests to GH. One would still need to hit…

We're still talking about git clone:ing a hundred thousand github repos. Git Repos get big very fast. That's a lot of data when you're realistically only interested in is a few markdown files per repo.

Re: SearchHut

#146
post #117

The site has just been taken offline by Drew due to the unfortunate start. I hope we can come back to this once the project has been properly launched, although Drew notes that he is "really unhappy with how the roll-out went" and that "my motivation for this project has evaporated" [1]. Thanks for all the work Drew, I hope you guys manage to come to a conclusion that you are satisfied with! [1]: https://paste.sr.ht/…

Jesus he needs to take it easy. It's not that big of a deal.

Re: SearchHut

#147
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

Only problem is that Wikidata is still incomplete when compared to Wikipedia itself. But yeah it's "trivial" to search it.

Re: SearchHut

#148
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires google account, has tracking and isn't open-source. I'd say it is no go

Add to that the likelihood that Google will just randomly cancel the product one day. Why invest time in this Google product?

It's been around forever, but your concern is real. Who's to say an OSS project won't get archived, or removed from the internet? Why invest time into anything when it will all be replaced eventually?

edit: Looks like this OSS project was launched and cancelled in a single day.

Re: SearchHut

#149

Quite passive aggressive if you ask me. Boo-boo someone shared your project before you were “ready”. If you don’t want something disclosed , don’t disclose it. Only way for three people to keep a secret is if two of them are dead. A thing is in the world. Let it be in the world. Harness the collective power and focus it into a force multiplier. Or don’t.

Whole thing sounds made up. "Haha oops one of my fans from IRC totally misunderstood and got me additional publicity UwU"

Re: SearchHut

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that the likelihood that Google will just randomly cancel the product one day. Why invest time in this Google product?

It's been around forever, but your concern is real. Who's to say an OSS project won't get archived, or removed from the internet? Why invest time into anything when it will all be replaced eventually? edit: Looks like this OSS project was launched and cancelled in a single day.

> Looks like this OSS project was launched and cancelled in a single day.

Touché :-)

However the idea of a federated search is some measure of protection against that. If it ever happens.

Post reply on HN