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

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

#31

Post by jasfi »

Fethbita wrote: post #23
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/

I've read about Marginalia Search before, and I love it purely because of my interest in search engines and wanting to see innovation in the field.

I just tried it (with a query relevant to something of interest to me) and the results are interesting, very technical, which is what I want.

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

#32

Post by devjab »

phito wrote: post #26
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.

I switched to Ecosia, but I’m basically in the same boat. What I’m finding more and more often is that I need both Ecosia and Google results to actually find what I’m looking for.

Because both places give me so much useless crap in the results. Hell… I wanted to buy two nerf guns recently, and I ended up having to go to a 3rd party site called pricerunner.dk because both Google and Ecosia kept giving me shit results from 0 of the Danish toy stores I might actually use. That pricerunner site is terrible by the way, so it speaks volumes when it’s more useful than Google search. I’m not sure why Google search for instance will link me to Amazon.com or Amazon.uk and not an amazon front within the EU where I won’t have to pay import taxes as an example. I have German listed as a language I speak so Amazon.de would seem obvious. Not that I’d ever buy anything from Amazon if it was available from a Danish web store , but it’s an example of just how bad it is.

Finding information was the first thing to disappear from search engines, but now it seems that it may as well bookmark a bunch of stores and go directly to them to begin with. Maybe it’s better in the US but it’s ridiculously bad in Denmark.

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

#33

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

raincole wrote: post #30
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.)

"Product placement" sounds vague/subjective - are the posts on Hacker News 'product placement'? I think, on average, most people would prefer a form of product placement to privacy-abusing, experience-debilitating, irrelevant ads.

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

#34

Post by lelanthran »

cj wrote: post #16
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…

> why get their site to the top of the rankings if they can't put any advertisements on it? You would need to penalize any website that accepts money from users. There are a lot of SaaS companies out there writing blog spam to promote subscription products.

> You would need to penalize any website that accepts money from users. There are a lot of SaaS companies out there writing blog spam to promote subscription products.

I don't see that as a problem, because blog-spam without advertisements is going to get down-ranked until it is exactly where it needs to be. If a single site dominates too much, then a hard cap on how how often a specific site can appear in the results is feasible, or weighing each page with a percentage of all the pages on a site (thereby penalising sites that have millions of pages). Specific exceptions can be made for wikipedia, or similar.

For example, lets look at digital-ocean: Is that constant blogging something that users find helpful? Well, if a page is relevant to the search term then there's no problem. If it's not then the numbers of 'irrelevant to this search' feedback from logged-in users will gradually down-vote it until it is correctly ranked. If it's relevant but is one of 30k pages on the site that matches relevancy with that search term then it gets down-ranked.

Basically, the motivation to do nothing but spam is completely eliminated. People spamming "How to do $TRIVIAL-THING" to drive engagement with their SaaS product is, I feel, a completely valid result if the search term matches relevancy with the specific blog post, and the site isn't doing a barrage of postings.

Humans respond to incentives. Taking away the incentive to generate endless drivel and replacing it with the incentive to provide good content is the intention behind my proposal.

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

#35

Post by pjmlp »

voiceblue wrote: post #7
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.

Try using Google like an average person. I Googled "best places to visit in Peru", and Google gave me a little drop down right there on the page that listed a few, without me having to go elsewhere. DDG did not. Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't. HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometim…

It is the same thing discussing BSD/Linux distributions as alternatives, that same average person is going down to the shopping mall on the city center, and buy whatever is on display on the computing stores, after getting some counseling from an high school student working part-time on the store.

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

#36

Post by wildpeaks »

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…

In Firefox, there is a way that doesn't require a flag: create a bookmark with the url, and set its "keyword" field to the trigger word you want for the engine.

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

#37

Post by lelanthran »

Fethbita wrote: post #23
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/

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

I have tried it before, but it appears to me that it dismisses all commercial content altogether, which is not what I want. That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

For example, I searched for "The Vietnam of computer science" (Without the quotes) and it returned zero results.

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

#38

Post by 12907835202 »

Fethbita wrote: post #23
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/

I just tried it on a query for video game mods ("Football Manager Graphics") and it was awful.

I did a couple of other searches and realised the website I expected to be indexed, sortitoutsi.net, was not.

Nonetheless, even without that specific website in the index the results were truly bad.

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

#39

Post by mrweasel »

devjab wrote: post #32
phito wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I switched to Ecosia, but I’m basically in the same boat. What I’m finding more and more often is that I need both Ecosia and Google results to actually find what I’m looking for. Because both places give me so much useless crap in the results. Hell… I wanted to buy two nerf guns recently, and I ended up having to go to a 3rd party site called pricerunner.dk because both Google and Ecosia kept giving me shit results…

Pricerunner is not great, but I'm in the same boat. I find myself using it more and more, because it's pretty much the only good way to find product while filtering out the most ridicules storefronts, like Fruugo or VidaXL, at least in Denmark.

I switched to Ecosia two years ago, from DuckDuckGo, and I really don't find myself going back to Google all that often. There are some search there I figure that something should have shown up, but mostly Google can't find it either.

Ecosia started mixing in Google results a few months ago, but I don't feel like it improved the results, if anything it's perhaps a little worse. That's anecdotal and not based on any actual tests though.

Kagi does look more and more interesting, because the issue seems to be the focus on ads and pushing stuff for people to buy. I just feel like Ecosia should be doing more to limit purchasing, given their environmental focus.

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