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SearchHut

searchhut.org

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Re: SearchHut

#21

Post by exitb »

tsujp wrote: post #7

SearchHut was built to this point in about a week by Drew and contributors which I think is amazing. It is also meant to be very simple to run in the case you want to index your own category of sites. For instance cooking content is specifically not indexed but if _you_ wanted to you can spin up an instance and index cooking sites yourself.

This seems like a great idea, honesty. There are niche topics that are very hard to navigate in Google, because it’s so skewed towards mainstream topics. I think it would make sense for these communities to maintain their own search engine.

Re: SearchHut

#22

Post by mda »

p-e-w wrote: post #16
birken wrote: post #14

> SearchHut indexes from a curated set of domains. The quality of results is higher as a result, but the index covers a small subset of the web. [citation needed] The quality of the results right now are not very high, and in theory I don't understand why one would believe a search engine with a hand picked set of domains would be expected to outcompete a search engine that can crawl the entire web and determines rep…

> If you are going to rely on domain-level reputation then your search engine is going to be way behind the search engines that can judge content more specifically, which is all of the other search engines. Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries? "All of the other search engines" have completely failed to keep pages from the results that are not only low-quality, but outright spam.

They definitely do not return "90% garbage for most queries". This 8s an unsubstantiated claim I see often i HN and honestly not backed by any real data. e.g. You can check your search history and see it yourself.

Re: SearchHut

#23

Post by verall »

I guess cppreference.com isn't even a part of the list?

I tried a couple test queries:

> lambda decay to function pointer c++

I get some FSF pages and the wikipedia for Helium?

> std function

I get... tons of Rust docs?

> std function c++

All rust docs? The wikipedia page for C++??

Interesting idea, but this seems like it would be the primary failure mode for an idea like this: as soon as you are researching outside of the curator's specializations, it doesn't have what you're looking for. Yet these results would both be fixed simply by adding cppreference.com to the index. Let's try and give it a real challenge:

> How to define systemverilog interface

And as I might expect, I get wikipedia pages. For "Verilog", for "System on a Chip" and for "Mixin".

1st google result:

> An Interface is a way to encapsulate signals into a block...

Working as expected

Re: SearchHut

#25

Post by birken »

p-e-w wrote: post #16
birken wrote: post #14

> SearchHut indexes from a curated set of domains. The quality of results is higher as a result, but the index covers a small subset of the web. [citation needed] The quality of the results right now are not very high, and in theory I don't understand why one would believe a search engine with a hand picked set of domains would be expected to outcompete a search engine that can crawl the entire web and determines rep…

> If you are going to rely on domain-level reputation then your search engine is going to be way behind the search engines that can judge content more specifically, which is all of the other search engines. Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries? "All of the other search engines" have completely failed to keep pages from the results that are not only low-quality, but outright spam.

> Then why do Google and DuckDuckGo return 90% garbage for most queries?

If you can give me a list of 10 normal-ish queries where 9 out of the first 10 results on Google or DDG are "garbage", then I'll concede your point.

I think you are creating an impossible standard for search engines, then using it to deem the current ones as failures. While at the same time ignoring that this new search engine is, as present, unusable with no realistic argument for why it might eventually be better.

Re: SearchHut

#27

Post by richardsocher »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I like the idea of searching a curated list of domains, but I'm not sure that doing the curation yourself is the best approach considering the huge number of useful but niche websites in existence. I wonder if simply parsing all of Wikipedia (dumps are available, and so are parsers capable of handling them) and building a list of all domains used in external links would do the trick. Wikipedia already has substantial…

That's our strategy at you.com - we start with the most popular sites, crawl them and build apps for them, eg. you.com/apps and let users vote in search results.

Full disclosure: I'm the CEO.

Re: SearchHut

#28

Post by mormegil »

p-e-w wrote: post #13

I like the idea of searching a curated list of domains, but I'm not sure that doing the curation yourself is the best approach considering the huge number of useful but niche websites in existence. I wonder if simply parsing all of Wikipedia (dumps are available, and so are parsers capable of handling them) and building a list of all domains used in external links would do the trick. Wikipedia already has substantial…

The "official website" links can be retrieved in a machine-readable way from Wikidata. E.g. a completely random silly example of official websites of embassies: https://w.wiki/5T3R

Re: SearchHut

#29

Post by reidrac »

verall wrote: post #23

I guess cppreference.com isn't even a part of the list? I tried a couple test queries: > lambda decay to function pointer c++ I get some FSF pages and the wikipedia for Helium? > std function I get... tons of Rust docs? > std function c++ All rust docs? The wikipedia page for C++?? Interesting idea, but this seems like it would be the primary failure mode for an idea like this: as soon as you are researching outside…

I guess missing content can be explained by...

> Notice! This product is experimental and incomplete. User beware!

But in reality, if you know where is the answer that you are looking for, why would you use that search engine.

I use DDG and if I want to search on the Scala docs, I use "!scala whatever I'm searching" instead of just search with DDG.

Re: SearchHut

#30

Post by meibo »

verall wrote: post #23

I guess cppreference.com isn't even a part of the list? I tried a couple test queries: > lambda decay to function pointer c++ I get some FSF pages and the wikipedia for Helium? > std function I get... tons of Rust docs? > std function c++ All rust docs? The wikipedia page for C++?? Interesting idea, but this seems like it would be the primary failure mode for an idea like this: as soon as you are researching outside…

GitHub doesn't seem to be either. I get that it's a competitor but not being able to search GitHub is probably a deal breaker for most devs that aren't Drew.
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