A search engine built by the crowd • Hacker News Board

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#21

Post by c54 » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 3:58 PM UTC

Google is a good name for a search engine, and easily usable as a verb.

Yahoo is pretty good, and was used as a verb for all of the 90s and early 2000s. IMO not as good as "I'm going to google that", "I'm going to yahoo that" sounds vaguely sexual.

DuckDuckGo and AskJeeves are terribad: "I'm going to duck duck go that"? No.

Blippex is better than ddg or ask jeeves, but still not too great. Coming up with a good product name is hard but is crucial for usability / spread through culture. Reminds me of blumpkin.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#22

Post by karli » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 3:59 PM UTC

robrenaud wrote: post #17

+1 for being super ambitious. Full disclosure: I work at Google (though not on web search). Your search actually sucks, perhaps because your index is woefully inadequate. How many pages are in it? Maybe you should use common crawl?

Its says it a t the bottom of the page, not a lot, more stats are here: https://www.blippex.org/status

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#23

Post by dwg » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:01 PM UTC

1. PRISM? 2. Often best sites are the ones I spend the least amount of time on—because I got an answer quickly. Would hate to not be able to find those site. Seems link the traditional form of ranking should still be an important part of your solution.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#24

Post by marban » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

c54 wrote: post #21

Google is a good name for a search engine, and easily usable as a verb. Yahoo is pretty good, and was used as a verb for all of the 90s and early 2000s. IMO not as good as "I'm going to google that", "I'm going to yahoo that" sounds vaguely sexual. DuckDuckGo and AskJeeves are terribad: "I'm going to duck duck go that"? No. Blippex is better than ddg or ask jeeves, but still not too great. Coming up with a good produ…

The verb bonus of Google is indeed killer but Google sounds primarily better because Google is Google.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#25

Post by karli » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:02 PM UTC

karli wrote: post #18

lucb1e wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that was a quick response, at least that's a positive thing :). I installed the add-on. Testing the search engine, searches seem to take forever. It keeps displaying the spinning icon in the orange square next to my query. Edit: Ah the niceness of asynchronous javascript. It returns an error (I can see it in the JS console) but the page never displays that to me. Good ol' page reloads wouldn't have done that . I…

Strange, should work in under one second, but you need to have javascript enabled, the site is made in AngularJS (so no hidden things there too)

PS: i hope the it's problem is now solved :)

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#26

Post by karli » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:03 PM UTC

dwg wrote: post #23

1. PRISM? 2. Often best sites are the ones I spend the least amount of time on—because I got an answer quickly. Would hate to not be able to find those site. Seems link the traditional form of ranking should still be an important part of your solution.

Maybe, we don't kmow yet, need more data :) we also weight the number of visits in the dwell factor, but maybe we have to adapt this in the future.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#27

Post by marban » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:07 PM UTC

a3_nm wrote: post #5

It's sad to think that, with Google Analytics, Google probably has this data point already available for a lot of pages without having to ask people to install stuff.

Sure, but last time I checked there was an opt-in for sharing the data (for industry benchmarks I think) so I assume this would require a new legal foundation.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#28

Post by trickjarrett » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

pdog wrote: post #19

trickjarrett wrote: post #8

I had a similar idea in college which was to take the actual traffic for pages into account for search ranking (this was before Google bought whatever Analytics had been called before, I can't remember.) I had thought of it as a server side app which would benefit the hosts while feeding the search engine traffic data. After talking with friends we explored the idea of a user side traffic tracking app as a way to fee…

> We felt it would be its own browser. Why not a browser add-on or extension?

At the time FF was still behind IE and IE hadn't really adopted extensions yet, I think. It's a bit fuzzy how we got there, this wasn't like a formal business plan and analysis, this was some college guys in the dorms chewing on an idea for a few weeks.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#29

Post by jeremybencken » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:15 PM UTC

Great idea, but I think Google already uses this data.

Google Toolbar and now Chrome report this data back to Google, and most search pros believe "serp bounce back" and "time on site" are key signals Google uses.

PageRank and DwellRank are not either-or choices.

Here's my theory: Google uses PageRank to decide what pages to "try out" for a query (i.e. display a page in the SERP for a sampling of queries). If the page gets clicks AND has good "DwellRank" then it gets progressively better and better rankings. If a new page enters that beats it, it falls.

This approach is very Googly -- they love to test. They love to decide if product features are good or not by giving them a sampling of traffic. It would be insane of them not to extend this approach to search.

So the upshot is, use "PageRank" to decide which pages deserve an audition, and use "DwellRank" to decide the winners.

Since 40% of the clicks go to #1, 10% to #2, 8% to #3 etc,Google can audition pages using DwellRank without affecting the experience of the majority of their users.

Re: A search engine built by the crowd

#30

Post by antitrust » Thu, Jul 11, 2013, 4:23 PM UTC

c54 wrote: post #21

Google is a good name for a search engine, and easily usable as a verb. Yahoo is pretty good, and was used as a verb for all of the 90s and early 2000s. IMO not as good as "I'm going to google that", "I'm going to yahoo that" sounds vaguely sexual. DuckDuckGo and AskJeeves are terribad: "I'm going to duck duck go that"? No. Blippex is better than ddg or ask jeeves, but still not too great. Coming up with a good produ…

Blippex sounds like a dubstep musician.

Despite dubstep being apparently totally uncool, I'm cool with that.

Wait for the bass drop.