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Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

programmablesearchengine.googleblog.com

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Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#121

Post by saltysalt »

1718627440 wrote: post #97
saltysalt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

The input on the results page doesn't work, you always need to return to the start page on which the browser history is disabled. That's just confusing behaviour.

I guess you used the return key instead of clicking on the search icon? Seems to be a bug with the return key, I'll fix that this weekend sorry.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#122

Post by saltysalt »

tosti wrote: post #98
saltysalt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

This is pretty cool. Don't let the naysayers stop you. Taking a stab at beating Google at their core product is bravery in my book. The best of luck to you!

Thank you kindly! It's just for fun.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#124

Post by saltysalt »

1718627440 wrote: post #103
saltysalt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

You should consider filtering by input language. Showing the same Wikipedia article in different languages is not helpful when I am searching in English. Also you may unify by entries by URL, it shows the same URL, just with different publish dates, which is interesting and might be useful, but should maybe be behind a toggle, as it is confusing at first.

Great feedback, agree I need to filter here. Some website localization is very hard to work around, because they will try to geo-locate the IP address of your bot and redirect it accordingly to a given language...

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#126

Post by DangitBobby »

throwaway290 wrote: post #96
echelon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No wonder Kagi is angry. Google is a monopoly across several broad categories. They're also a taxation enterprise. Google Search took over as the URL bar for 91% of all web users across all devices. Since this intercepts trademarks and brand names, Google gets to tax all businesses unfairly. Tell your legislators in the US and the EU that Google shouldn't be able to sell ads against registered trademarks (+/- some ed…

what stops Kagi from indexing internet and makes them pay some guys to scrape search results from Google? one guy at Marginalia can do it and entire dev team at a PAID search engine can't?

As we've seen here on HN on the AI boom, it's not wonderful when a bunch of companies all use bots to scrape the entire web. Many sites only allow Google scrapers in robots.txt and the public will fight you hard if you scrape them without permission. It's just one of those things where it would be better for everyone if search engines could pay for access to the work that's done only once.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#127

Post by mark_l_watson »

Not directly covered by this blog, but for low cost and good performance the combination of gemini-3-flash with search grounding is hard to beat, at least for the many small experiments I use it for.

One thing touched upon in comments here: I never understood how it was proper for 3rd parties to scrape Google search results and reuse/resell them.

Really off topic, sorry, but I am surprised that more companies don’t build local search indices for just the few hundred web domains that are important to their businesses. I have tried this in combination with local (small and fast) LLMs and I think this is unappreciated tech: fast, cheap, and local.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#128

Post by saltysalt »

lolive wrote: post #75
saltysalt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

Lol, a GooglePlus URL was mentionned on a webpage i browsed this week.#blastFromThePast

I still remember their circles interface ;-)

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#129

Post by DangitBobby »

mrweasel wrote: post #102
Hackbraten wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I understand Kagi's blog post correctly, then here's what happened, chronologically: Kagi makes deals with many search engines so they can have raw search results in exchange for money. Google says: no, you can't have raw search results because only whales can get those. Only thing we can offer you is search results riddled with ads and we won't allow you to reorder or filter them. Kagi thinks Google's offer is un…

I don't really see any mentioning of a new API, beyond their Vertex AI thing, and I don't know how comparable that might be. Also it is capped at 50 domains (by default). It is perhaps a clever legal workaround. They must sell access to their index, but the verdict didn't state how much of it you can buy access to at any one time. So they put a limit of 50 domains, because that accommodates everyone who's not a searc…

It's only a "clever" workaround in a captured legal system that isn't interested in anti-monopoly outcomes. Any competent legal system would slap that shit down. Just the thought that they could "hack this ruling with one weird trick" is infuriating.

Re: Updates to our web search products and Programmable Search Engine capabilities

#130

Post by saltysalt »

jfindley wrote: post #91
saltysalt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built my own web search index on bare metal, index now up to 34m docs: https://greppr.org/ People rely too much on other people's infra and services, which can be decommissioned anytime. The Google Graveyard is real.

Unfortunately the index is the easy part. Transforming user input into a series of tokens which get used to rank possible matches and return the top N, based on likely relevence, is the hard part and I'm afraid this doesn't appear to do an acceptable job with any of the queries I tested. There's a reason Google became so popular as quickly as it did. It's even harder to compete in this space nowadays, as the volume o…

I am definitely not trying to complete with Google, instead I am offering an old-school "just search" engine with no tracking, personalization filtering, or AI.

It's driven by my own personal nostalgia for the early Internet, and to find interesting hidden corners of the Internet that are becoming increasingly hard to find on Google after you wade through all of the sponsored results and spam in the first few pages...

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