It you like wacky search engines, there's also Million Short: https://millionshort.com where you can search and remove the top 100/1K/10k/100K/1M results.
A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
161–170 of 735 posts
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did a search for "George Washington" First result after Wikipedia: "Radiophone Transmitter on the U.S.S. George Washington (1920) In 1906, Reginald Fessenden contracted with General Electric to build the first alternator transmitter. G.E. continued to perfect alternator transmitter design, and at the time of this report, the Navy was operating one of G.E.'s 200 kilowatt alternators http://earlyradiohistory.us/1919w…
Hobby project leads angry person to interesting and unexpected material; angry person remains angry. Details at six.
> Hobby project leads angry person to interesting and unexpected material; angry person remains angry.
Not angry in the least. I'm thrilled someone is working on a search competitor to Google.
I understand you're attempting to dismiss my pointing out the bad results by calling me angry though. You're focusing your content on me personally, instead of what I pointed out.
The parent was far overhyping the results in a way that was very misleading (look, it's better than Google!). I tried various searches, they were not great results. The parent was very clearly implying something a lot better than that by what they said. The product isn't close to being at that level at this point, overhyping it to such an absurd degree isn't reasonable or fair to the person that is working on it.
I would specifically suggest people not compare it to Google. Let it be its own thing, at least for a good while. Google (Alphabet) is a trillion dollar company. Don't press the expectations so far and stage it to compete with Google at this point. I wouldn't even reference Google in relation to this search engine, let it be its own thing and find its own mindshare.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#163This engine is fantastic for recipes
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as few people use it, it will be great. Rest assured that the moment it becomes popular, the people who want to game it will appear.
This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.
That's why I use Saffron [1], it magically converts those sites into a page in my recipe book. I found it when the developer commented here in HN. Also, a lot of cooking website have started to add a link with "jump to recipe" functionality allowing you to skip all the crap.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#165A common use case, how to do random thing in programming:
I searched python make a bar chart and it returned a live coding video with an AI generated text transcript and two articles which mentioned a different kind of bar.
I then narrowed it down to just python bar chart, and got a blog post about scripting with a bar chart in it, this http://www.nitcentral.com/voyager4/hellyear.htm with monty python, bars, and charts from 1996 and among some other things I found this https://python-course.eu/naive_bayes_classifier_introduction..., which had an example of a python bar chart even though the title of the page made me think it wasn't what I wanted.
So for what I imagine to be a difficult search because of all the different meanings of the words, I found my result on the second query pretty quickly, and found some cool unrelated stuff too.
I like mostly that I get what I type in, and not exactly what I want, but what I want is there too.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.
That's why I use Saffron [1], it magically converts those sites into a page in my recipe book. I found it when the developer commented here in HN. Also, a lot of cooking website have started to add a link with "jump to recipe" functionality allowing you to skip all the crap. [1] https://www.mysaffronapp.com/
There's also https://based.cooking.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as few people use it, it will be great. Rest assured that the moment it becomes popular, the people who want to game it will appear.
This sort of optimization is why simple recipes are typically found at the end of a rambling pointless blog post now. Still, the best way to break SEO is to have actual competition in the search space. As long as SEO remains focused on Google there is an opportunity for these companies to thrive by evading SEO braindamage.
I've noticed this pattern start to pop up elsewhere. I've started to train my skimming skills, skipping a paragraph or two at a time to get past the fluff.
Like an article about some current event will undoubtedly begin with "when I was traveling ten years ago...".
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did a search for "George Washington" First result after Wikipedia: "Radiophone Transmitter on the U.S.S. George Washington (1920) In 1906, Reginald Fessenden contracted with General Electric to build the first alternator transmitter. G.E. continued to perfect alternator transmitter design, and at the time of this report, the Navy was operating one of G.E.'s 200 kilowatt alternators http://earlyradiohistory.us/1919w…
Hobby project leads angry person to interesting and unexpected material; angry person remains angry. Details at six.
The project explicitly bills itself as a "search engine", not an "interesting and unexpected material surfacer". Moreover, projecting emotions like "angry" onto a comment in order to discredit the content of the comment (hey! is that an ad-hominem?) is just about exactly the opposite of the discussions that the HN mods are trying to curate, and the discussions that I like to see here.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#169I like it. Coincidentally, the other day I was daydreaming about a search engine that favors sites that are updated less frequently. The thought being, the kinds of labors of love that characterized the 1990s Web that I still sometimes miss are still out there, it's just harder to find them amidst the flood of SEO dreck. So perhaps they could be made discoverable again with the help of a contrarian search engine that…
Similarly, I wish there was a recommendation engine (for web, music, movies, whatever) that can show you what is the furthest away from your existing tastes. I've learned to re-create my Spotify account once every 6 months or so, as their recommendation engine becomes a boring machine after using it daily for some months. I'd love to discover new content that is different from what I read/watch/listen to now, but it'…
It's hard, though. I simultaneously want something far from my tastes, but I don't want to see Plandemic-style Ivermectin material, or Focus On The Family-style material. I want things that will push me out of my comfort zone sometimes, but it turns out I really don't want the thing furthest from my tastes; I want things marginally adjacent. I want them close enough to feel familiarity, but far enough that it challenges my worldview.
I don't think a recommendation engine can do that.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#170curious how do you afford the infrastructure? I found that the hardest part of running a search engine.
I'm self-hosting, and the server is a Ryzen 7 3900x with 128 Gb of non-ECC RAM. It sits in my living room next to a cheap UPS. I did snag one of the last remaining Optane 900Ps off Amazon, and it powers the index and the database--and I really do think this is among the best hardware choices for this use case. But beyond that it's really nothing special, hardware-wise. Like it's less than a month's salary.
It runs Debian, and all the services run bare metal with zero containerization.
Modern consumer hardware can be absurdly powerful if you let it.
Like I have no doubt a thousand engineers could spend a hundred times as much time building a search engine that did pretty much the same thing mine does, it would require a full data center to stay running and be much slower. But that's just a cost of large scale software development I don't have to pay as a solo developer with no deadline, no planning and a shoestring budget.