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Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

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Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#181

Post by arb99 »

ssharp wrote: post #25
Cushman wrote: post #16

I'd be fascinated to see the kind of SEO that would go on if this took off. "Bad news-- we're a top 100 hit for several of our main keywords. We'll have to change our URL scheme again."

High page rank pages / sites could start holding competitors' pages hostage by linking to them. Maybe we'd see a resurgence in Flash.

whats flash got to do with anything?

search engines can follow links (sometimes) through flash. and search engines know what the most popular sites are even without counting number of links to sites, so hiding links through flash (or js, whatever) wouldn't help

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#183

Post by __alexs »

romaniv wrote: post #88
taxonomyman wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity I think is important. But not at the expense of relevance. It's not a easy nut to crack.

Why? If I search, say, for a game review, I don't care whether it comes from a popular website or a blog no one reads. In fact, the topmost websites are more likely to be biased, since they try to appease everyone and they also have strong relationships with publishers. The blog no one reads is nearly guaranteed to be honest (if not well-written). This holds true for most topics I can think of. Moreover, if I ever ne…

> Shouldn't web search engines act like discovery tools?

If your business model is based on advertising that depends on masses of page views to generate value, then no. You want to be as generally useful as possible so that e.g. people use you as an (extremely inefficient) DNS service.

(Google Labs has a single optional feature available for search. Perhaps their arch doesn't make 20% or Labs projects a good fit for plugging in extra fancy search features?)

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#184

Post by alan_cx »

erichocean wrote: post #89
jaems33 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of why I first moved to Google from Yahoo/Webcrawler/Altavista/etc in the first place.

Yup. Since this is trivial for Google to copy, it's unlikely that it'll actually disrupt Google in any way, but still...very cool.

I may well have this very wrong, wouldn't be the first time, but wont google loose a hell of a lot of money if they dont return the top results? It might be "easy" to implement technically, but I suspect it will completely muck up their revenue stream.

Perhaps there might be a great irony of this site becoming popular and using google ads to finance it!!!!!!

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#185

Post by robryan »

RegEx wrote: post #99
rudiger wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. How do you find blogs that don't implement nofollow?

Plenty of blogs promote themselves as DoFollow Blogs. It's a bit sad, really. They basically trade their "link juice" for your insincere, contrived comments.

Which in turn can help them rank for more terms.

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#187

Post by robryan »

hoprocker wrote: post #117
pash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a copy of the Wikipedia article on buffer overflows.

Looks like this idea isn't totally in the free-and-clear from content farms.

Yeah except now you get the content farms that don't know how to rank. A competitive spammy term like "pay day loans" still shows plenty of low quality sites because of the crazy number of sites looking to cash in on the term.

Re: Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

#188

Post by NLips »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #170
nostromo wrote: post #102

It's interesting to see popularity used as an inverse corollary with quality. Imagine a TV that skipped the most popular programming (goodbye American Idol), or a radio station that only plays non-hits. Of course, there are great websites out there that are very popular (Wikipedia, NYTimes/WSJ, StackOverflow). I'd love to see a search engine with a better signal for quality than non-popularity (this search engine), o…

That's an awesome idea. You guys should add a button to Google search results that would completely invert the result list, and show the lowest stuff first, highest stuff last. Almost like sorting a list of products by price. Anything you can identify as pure SEO spam, exclude of course. But if it's some original content that just isn't well connected or whatever, include it. Then just observe user behavior for a whi…

Reversing Google's results is an awful idea as you'd get the worst possible results for a search i.e. those that are completely unrelated to the search terms.

You need to either remove the top 100 (or 1000 etc) and look at what remains, or reverse only the top 10000 results (or 1000 etc).

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