How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by hoveringhen » Thu, May 23, 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

ricardo81 wrote: post #145

hoveringhen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth. Sorry didn't get this, what do you mean exactly?

Beyond 10 blue links, certain niches organic results have been pushed down the page and placed under G specific results (when I say certain, nowadays it's most). Celebritynetworth is an example of this where a site had some unique content, G apparently realised that lots of people search for such stuff, asked the owner for an API and then eventually scraped it. A rough version of events, more details below. There are…

Very interesting, thanks for the link!

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

#152

Post by marginalia_nu » Thu, May 23, 2024, 7:12 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #150

lelanthran wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hmm, seems like a bug in the query construction logic. Works if you drop the "the". https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=Vietnam+of+compute...

Fixed the bug. Some of the results are bit weird though, seems to be more vietnamese computer science than atwood. Interesting case, will probably be very useful for optimizing the result relevance.

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

#153

Post by Leftium » Fri, May 24, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

carlob wrote: post #40

Did anyone turn this into a duckduckgo bang?

Kagi allows you to define custom bangs: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#custom-bangs

And you can open an issue/pull request here: https://github.com/kagisearch/bangs

(Kagi's search bang redirects work even if you don't have a Kagi account.)

Kagi probably has the most updated search bangs, even though DuckDuckGo created them.

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

#154

Post by wazoox » Fri, May 24, 2024, 8:43 PM UTC

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.

Weird, I never ever use Google. When I do out of desperation (like when DDG was down two days ago) I find its results atrociously bad to the point of being almost useless.