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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

#51

Post by flir »

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…

It's your ranking system, so it's correct by definition (for you), but I've got to point out you're not considering the quality of the text. In your model, an empty page is perfect.

Cynically, maybe you're on to something...

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

#52

Post by corn13read2 »

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…

Let's collaborate

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

#53

Post by 6510 »

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…

Each char of css scores 1 bad, a char of js is 100 bad, one small advertisement is one million bad, a cookie banner is 5 million bad, news letter modals 123 456 bad, links and embeds pointing at big tech 100 trillion bad.

The pro version comes in 3 kinds: 50 cent, 10 usd and 100 usd per search. For this money you get one or more employees modifying the search results in real time. Pressing the "work harder" button increases the fee by .50,10,100 respectively. You can press it as often as you like.

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

#54

Post by bmacho »

wczerniak wrote: post #3

Is it worth it? Should we fight against search engine with workarounds like this? Looks like AI is just another problem with Google Search. But maybe I don't feel this pain like you do. I've fixed them all about a year ago by switching to Kagi and never looked back. Well, maybe at the beginning a little bit, but I like Kagi results more than Google now.

It is worth it, it is a great search website. Fast, clean, lean, aesthetically inspiring, and provides great results.

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

#55

Post by lelanthran »

flir wrote: post #51
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…

It's your ranking system, so it's correct by definition (for you), but I've got to point out you're not considering the quality of the text. In your model, an empty page is perfect. Cynically, maybe you're on to something...

> It's your ranking system, so it's correct by definition (for you), but I've got to point out you're not considering the quality of the text.

Yes. This is by design![1]

> In your model, an empty page is perfect.

Yes. What's the problem with that? An empty page won't match any search terms, will it?

[1] It's impossible to quickly and cheaply determine the quality of the text, in an age where it's cheaper for a blog-spammer to use AI to write 3k articles than for the crawler to use AI to check 3m articles.

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

#56

Post by gorbypark »

Unfortunately it seems that Safari hijacks all google.com/search?q= urls and strips all (or at least utm) query params, except q, when google is set to the default search engine!

Even pasting in https://google.com/search?q=apple+sauce&utm=14 to the url bar doesn't work. The only way I was able to get this to work was set DuckDuckGo (or anything non-google) as the default search engine, then use the extension "Smart Keyword Search" to setup a shortcut. I have !g for normal google search and !gw setup for google "web" search.

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

#57

Post by hrnnnnnn »

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.

For many of my searches DDG seems to completely ignore one or more of my keywords, usually giving me something more popular but less relevant. Almost every time when I try the same search on google it works.

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

#58

Post by bmacho »

wildpeaks wrote: post #36
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.

That works in chrome/edge too. (Even better, Edge matches urls with %s very good, and the URL bar offers past searches as suggestions better than Firefox does.)

They removed most bookmarks and search engine settings, but bookmarks with keywords work fine at the moment, for both mayor desktop browsers.

Also you can store them in a file(!) and import them for a nice cross browser experience, keeping track of them, and not losing them.

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

#59

Post by spurgu »

ndom91 wrote: post #24

Happy Kagi customer here and pushing it where I can. The results are much better than DDG or Brave search, which I both tried for a few months, and it's got some really nice built-in tools to bump domains up or down in results, block domains, etc.

Exactly the same experience here. Gave DDG a go, then ran with Brave Search for a couple of months, then discovered Kagi and never looked back.

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

#60

Post by vmfunction »

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.

You can also use https://startpage.com a proxy for google.

Kinda like the DDG -> Bing, StartPage -> google type of deal.

It is with recommended by EFF. Seems like a good way to search google without giving up privacy.

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