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Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

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Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#121

Post by TurboSkyline »

mrweasel wrote: post #119
chneu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG. All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol Google is way too "personalized".

The fact that Google seemingly returns results worse than Kagi, Startpage and Ecosia is just strange, given that Google provides search results for all three of them. Both Kagi and Ecosia uses other sources as well, I don't know about Startpage, so that's certainly part of it, but it still feels a little strange. From using Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Bing, I'd also argue that Bing is simply a better search engine at this…

Don’t Ecosia/Qwant have their own index now?

Do you find Bing better through Bing proper, or just as good through DDG (which uses the Bing index)?

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#122

Post by alex1138 »

npteljes wrote: post #104
ggm wrote: post #2

I'm not sure I've ever relied on google to tell me what a site like this had, when the site itself is fully indexed, as this one is. Freetext search over the metastate of title, author, format, date (when available) -seems to work.

Web searches like Google are great when searching for not exact terms, like synonyms for example. I have never encountered a website that has a search capability like that. Google finds the song "Million voices" by Otto Knows, from the search query "a a a a ah ah ah ah dance song".

Fantastic!

Now can we PLEASE have the boolean operators back? Especially now that Google+ kicked the bucket?

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#123

Post by syntaxers »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #117

A question to the community: would it be a (legal) problem if I decided to download digital copies of the physical books I already have in my bookshelf? I was thinking on using Anna's Archive for that. Hobby project.

17 USC 106 gives copyright holders exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute copies; no exemption exists for downloading digital copies because you own the physical book, and fair use (17 USC 107) is unlikely to apply when commercial alternatives exist and you’re copying entire works from unauthorized distributors.

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#124

Post by probably_wrong »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #117

A question to the community: would it be a (legal) problem if I decided to download digital copies of the physical books I already have in my bookshelf? I was thinking on using Anna's Archive for that. Hobby project.

As far as my extremely poor understanding of the law goes: this depends on where you live but generally you are not allowed to download a digital copy of a physical book you own, but you are allowed to create your own [1].

It may also be worth noting that most jurisdictions are only interested in distribution, not downloading, so the chances of prosecution are slim. A small company you may have heard of called Meta is currently using a similar argument in US court [2].

[1] https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/1111/i-have-a-pri...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#125

Post by npteljes »

alex1138 wrote: post #122
npteljes wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web searches like Google are great when searching for not exact terms, like synonyms for example. I have never encountered a website that has a search capability like that. Google finds the song "Million voices" by Otto Knows, from the search query "a a a a ah ah ah ah dance song".

Fantastic! Now can we PLEASE have the boolean operators back? Especially now that Google+ kicked the bucket?

No, I'm afraid they can't have it being too useful.

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#126

Post by spragl »

chneu wrote: post #21
someperson wrote: post #15

Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests. Eg if you want to watch a movie that's not on Netflix using a web stream the search results are far better. Feels like Google circa 2005.

I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG. All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol Google is way too "personalized".

DDG is okay. Startpage is quite good. I make a virtue of regularly shifting between search engines (not Google). Sometimes they are not so good, some times very good. On average Im sure my search experience is better than using Google.

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#127

Post by Llamamoe »

nullbyte808 wrote: post #49

Man I need to get around to downloading the z-archive torrents before annas archive is taken down. If I eliminate large PDFs and non english books I think I can fit it on two 32 TB drives with BTRFS z-std compression max setting. https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Depending on how important it is for you to maintain original quality, I have in the past had good luck with a combination of prerendering complex content, reducing the DPI and colour depth of images, and recombining them back into PDFs, depending on the file.

You could probably easily automate identifying different editions of the same content, and e.g. only keep an epub with small images, rather than the other 6 and 3 more PDFs as well.

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#129

Post by somenameforme »

chneu wrote: post #21
someperson wrote: post #15

Feels weird to say but I have found using Yandex of all places an excellent search engine for content that get taken down by DMCA requests. Eg if you want to watch a movie that's not on Netflix using a web stream the search results are far better. Feels like Google circa 2005.

I've been playing around with a variety of search engines such as Kagi, Startpage, Ecosia, DDG. All of them are better than google in finding relevant results. Lol Google is way too "personalized".

Brave search is also quite nice: https://search.brave.com/

I find Google to generally have some of the worst search results of modern engines with one exception - Google tends to be good at digging up results from things like forums/message boards that don't end up getting listed on other search engines.

I don't entirely understand why this is because other engines also have them indexed and work fine with something like: 'site:news.ycombinator.com anna's archive' [1][2] but yet those posts will basically never show up on the main results, regardless of how far down them you go.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.co...

[2] - https://yandex.com/search/?text=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Re: Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results

#130

Post by crowbahr »

moffkalast wrote: post #91
ternus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That phrase is Google's mission statement.

I thought their mission statement was "Don't be evil", until they shortened it for practicality to just "Be evil". It's certainly how they've been behaving in recent years.

That wasn't ever a mission statement, and fwiw it was in the employee handbook still in 2023 when I got laid off.
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