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How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

tedium.co

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Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#21

Post by underwater »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

But that web doesn’t exist anymore. The dominance of Google means all the creators and authors went elsewhere. Filter out the crap and you’ll realise that there’s very little substance left.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#22

Post by red_admiral »

triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

DDG is my default search engine, but there's some categories of things it's still not great at and I fall back to google (with some ublocking to disable "features" I don't want) for that.

`||google.*/complete/search$xmlhttprequest,important` turns off the autocomplete, for example.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#23

Post by Fethbita »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

Then maybe you might be interested in Marginalia Search https://search.marginalia.nu/

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#25

Post by thot_experiment »

wernsey wrote: post #18

I had to do some digging on SuperUser [0] to get this working in Firefox, because it has the "Add Search Engine" button disabled by default. * Go to `about:config` * Change `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true * Now you can go to `about:preferences#search` * ...and click the "Add" button below Search Shortcuts * Add ` https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 ` as your URL. * Set the name to "Google We…

I had to do this a while back and it's nearly made me punch my monitor. The lowest circle of hell for the person/people who decided putting this basic functionality behind a fucking arcane flag. Few things make me more mad than having my finite life wasted hunting down solutions to problems that have no reason to exist.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#26

Post by phito »

triyambakam wrote: post #4

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

I've using ddg for years but I find myself unconsciously ending up appending "!g" to almost all my searches. DDG results are just really not good, especially if I'm looking up something local.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#27

Post by dexen »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

Love this. Aligns with some of my recent musings. Even better, it would be largely immune to certain recently discovered problems with AI, including ingesting AI-generated content.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#28

Post by jabiko »

thot_experiment wrote: post #25
wernsey wrote: post #18

I had to do some digging on SuperUser [0] to get this working in Firefox, because it has the "Add Search Engine" button disabled by default. * Go to `about:config` * Change `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true * Now you can go to `about:preferences#search` * ...and click the "Add" button below Search Shortcuts * Add ` https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 ` as your URL. * Set the name to "Google We…

I had to do this a while back and it's nearly made me punch my monitor. The lowest circle of hell for the person/people who decided putting this basic functionality behind a fucking arcane flag. Few things make me more mad than having my finite life wasted hunting down solutions to problems that have no reason to exist.

Apparently its behind a flag because the feature is not completely ready yet. However I was unable to find what work is still needed for it to be considered ready: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1106626#c18

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#29

Post by lelanthran »

underwater wrote: post #21
lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

But that web doesn’t exist anymore. The dominance of Google means all the creators and authors went elsewhere. Filter out the crap and you’ll realise that there’s very little substance left.

> But that web doesn’t exist anymore. The dominance of Google means all the creators and authors went elsewhere. Filter out the crap and you’ll realise that there’s very little substance left.

Yes, and that signal/noise ratio will drop even further until some filtering gets done.

Filtering out the crap might slow the trend.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#30

Post by raincole »

lelanthran wrote: post #11

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

If this search engine ever gets popular, it will just push advertisers from ads to product placements.

That's it. Good luck writing your own algorithm that detects product placements from genuine human experience. (It would need an AI that is smarter than average human.)

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