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

millionshort.com

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

#101

Post by MichaelApproved »

taxonomyman wrote: post #56
shazow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is a great idea. Predictability is a staple of a good user experience. Getting different results for the same query between users or sessions is bound to lead to broken expectations and frustration.

Think of this as more of a discovery engine. And predictability takes the fun out of discovery.

Great point. You might have a hard time competing with google on relevant results but you might be able to beat them on discovery, like a stumbleupon search engine.

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

#102

Post by nostromo »

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), or SEO (Google), but it's a fun start. :)

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

#103

Post by serbrech »

The results feel actually fresh. It's removing the consumerism layer of bullshit that google serves us everyday. Also wondering if that has something to do with the "bubble" that google creates around us based on our search history and social network information.

Thanks for that.

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

#105

Post by noahc »

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.

The technology is trivial, but the reasons behind it and philosophy that drives it aren't.

Google isn't going to come along and say, "oh, guys, you're right...Wave, Buzz, Google+ all a mistake. Social Graph..Mistake!. We're sorry. We are rolling everything back to 2004"

Google has been increasingly more frustrating for power users over the last couple of years. People are looking for alternatives. DDG is one, this is another. Power users matter, and not just because they spend more time inside an application, but because they recommend it to others.

A perfect example of this is firefox. I used firefox a lot, and then switched to Chrome. I've since switched my mother, grandpa, brother, girlfriend, sister and too many friends to count to chrome. I now use DDG for all my searching needs via the bang syntax (!, !g, !w, etc). It's only a matter of time before the rest of my family follows along.

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

#106

Post by MichaelApproved »

martinaglv wrote: post #68

Is it safe to assume that this is how Google's search results would look if nobody did SEO?

I don't think so. Consider Facebook. They should show up when doing a search for social media or related term but with this SE, they don't show up at all for any search.

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

#107

Post by mmahemoff »

bo1024 wrote: post #18

I'd really like to see randomization instead. Return results picked randomly from within the top 10 million or something.

Would be cool in mobile devices to see a shake gesture to "shake up" the results.

You could use this on modern smartphone browsers: https://github.com/alexgibson/shake.js

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

#108

Post by romaniv »

pash wrote: post #51
RegEx wrote: post #10

I like this idea a lot. I came across a nice, concise explanation of a Buffer overflow http://www.apolis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=...

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

One of the addition I would make to this search engine is to delete all the Wikipedia clones from the results.

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

#109

Post by borism »

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.

It isn't always simple for large organisations to copy/implement trivial/common sense things.

While Google has it's head up its' ass^H^H^H social stuff, there doesn't seem to be any effort to actually improve search.

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

#110

Post by taxonomyman »

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…

Maybe think of Million Short as more of a discovery engine. We're not saying a quality site can't be popular.
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