Teclis – Non-commercial web search • Hacker News Board

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#21

Post by fernly » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

dbrereton wrote: post #10

Lots of great new search engines popping up that search the rest of the web that Google tends to ignore. Other ones worth checking out include: - https://search.marginalia.nu/ (A non-commercial search engine) - https://wiby.me/ (Tends to have those really weird and cool indie sites) - https://searchmysite.net/ (An index of personal websites) - https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/ (Search IndieWeb websites) - https://…

https://andisearch.com/

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#22

Post by agencies » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

metadat wrote: post #6

The results seem crappy to me, teclis found what I wanted zero percent of the time. Hopefully they can keep iterating and improving this; a new entrant to Search is always welcome! Because we desperately need something better and more useful than Goggle. It'll take a paradigm shift, for sure.

What were your failed searches?

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#23

Post by ______-_-______ » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

Fun bug, searching for the letter e crashes the site

http://teclis.com/search?q=e

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#24

Post by forgotpwd16 » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 10:56 PM UTC

______-_-______ wrote: post #23

Fun bug, searching for the letter e crashes the site http://teclis.com/search?q=e

Or any other single character query.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#25

Post by researchers » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

Really great work! It is exciting that people are working on alternative indexes of content, especially ones that prioritize content written by individuals for smaller audiences. The uBlock heuristic is an interesting way to capture that.

Matches well with our thesis we wrote about here: https://re-search.xyz/writing/mapping-the-new-world-towards-...

Disclaimer: We’re a research group that is also working on a new kind of search engine. Our approach is a little different though. We think that information is now scattered across different semi-open silos, so the future of search will not look like a search bar and ten blue links to web pages.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#26

Post by metadat » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:12 PM UTC

agencies wrote: post #22

metadat wrote: post #6

The results seem crappy to me, teclis found what I wanted zero percent of the time. Hopefully they can keep iterating and improving this; a new entrant to Search is always welcome! Because we desperately need something better and more useful than Goggle. It'll take a paradigm shift, for sure.

What were your failed searches?

My real name

Projects on GitHub (if it found anything, it was shitty, unmaintained forks)

Current events like the war in ukraine

Wikipedia articles

Terms found on websites I host or frequent which do not serve any form of advertisement (not indexed apparently, the hits were completely irrelevant with zero matching terms)

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#27

Post by corny » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:19 PM UTC

Really like the design of this. Best search results layout I've seen since the old days of google.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#28

Post by marginalia_nu » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #13

Hey all - creator here. It looks like next page of results does not work currently because wrong query param (should be "q" instead of "topics"). Easy enough to manually change if you need it. As a few of you noticed, narrow searches do not work very well because this is not a general web search engine and has a tiny index compared to Google. Use Teclis to discover more about a broader topic you are interested in and…

> As a few of you noticed, narrow searches do not work very well because this is not a general web search engine and has a tiny index compared to Google. Use Teclis to discover more about a broader topic you are interested in and to discover writing from 'clean' websites on the web.

Are you getting better results with vector search?

I've been looking at this problem with my search engine as well. I've recently side-loaded all of stackoverflow and stackexchange, and searching in that part of the index is still not great at finding narrow results like you can on bigger search engines, when that reasonably speaking should be possible.

I think, beyond the fact that my index is DIY and fairly crude, algorithms like BM25 are designed to identify topical keywords, and they do that rather well, but narrow searches go far beyond merely the topic and often involve words that aren't important to the document but are important to some particular context within it.

I may have some ideas to get around this, but they're fairly half baked. Experiments are needed.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#29

Post by drusepth » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

I know it's not meant for narrow results, but I still chuckled a bit when searching my own nick surfaced an entire serp with nothing but unrelated blog posts about being dyslexic. Wonder if it's just because "drusepth" sounds similar enough to "dyslexic"?

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#30

Post by marginalia_nu » Wed, Mar 23, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

dbrereton wrote: post #10

Lots of great new search engines popping up that search the rest of the web that Google tends to ignore. Other ones worth checking out include: - https://search.marginalia.nu/ (A non-commercial search engine) - https://wiby.me/ (Tends to have those really weird and cool indie sites) - https://searchmysite.net/ (An index of personal websites) - https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/ (Search IndieWeb websites) - https://…

I think this is among the more complete lists:

https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...