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A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

search.marginalia.nu

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Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#211

Post by allknowingfrog »

fouric wrote: post #168
JasonFruit wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you click through to the About page, I think you'll see that "interesting and unexpected material surfacer" is a fairly apt description of the project.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#212

Post by Phileosopher »

Wow, if this catches on, my original content will actually matter![1] I've always had a love-hate relationship with modern web design principles because my design choices have all the excitement and polish of what we get on HN.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, either. Content-rich sites need more love.

[1] https://adequate.life

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#213

Post by marginalia_nu »

timvisee wrote: post #209
marginalia_nu wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I think the charset detection needs work. It understands the "Content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8" -header, and but not It turns out HTML has a lot of corner cases. I'm constantly marveling at how web browsers hold together as well as they do.

Thanks for your response! Hope you can implement this as well without too much trouble. I wonder if you could just assume UTF-8 to be the default these days. I imagine that to fix many other cases as well.

Haha! I did actually assume UTF-8 at first, but being a search engine has a lot of older websites, I sadly got a lot of encoding errors doing that, too.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#214

Post by leephillips »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #208
burkaman wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That query is too long apparently. But if you shorten to "haskell type inference", I think it delivers on its promise: > If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you're on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

The search engine doesn't do any type of re-ordering or synonym stuff, it only tires to construct different N-grams from the search query. So if you for example compare "SDL tutorial" with "SDL tutorials". On google you'd get the same stuff, this search engine, for better or worse doesn't. This is a design decision, for now anyway, mostly because I'm incredibly annoyed when algorithms are second-guessing me. On the o…

I like this design decision. It pays you back for choosing your search terms carefully.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#215

Post by greggturkington »

bityard wrote: post #206
greggturkington wrote: post #177

Wouldn't this just skew towards really old sites? The third search result for "dog" is this page on how to remove AOL Instant Messenger, published in 2002. https://sillydog.org/netscape/kb/removeaim.html No one wants to see newsletter signup popovers, but "modern web design" includes good performance and relevant content. (The search engine itself takes about 2 seconds to first contentful paint, not great.)

This search engine pretty much takes everything that Google is doing and does the opposite. For instance, Google has decided that "relevant" usually also means "recent". Thus, when searching for something on Google, you mainly get results from blogspam farms and almost never do you see anything more than a few years old. An implication of this is that old sites tend to disappear (either into obscurity or by being tak…

What "fundamental redeeming quality" about uninstalling AIM from Windows 3.x motivated making that the 3rd result for "dog"?

The 5th result is a tutorial on CSS. This search engine decided it's relevant because it has "dog" in the URL. Is that a better reasoning than Google's? https://htmldog.com/guides/css/beginner/

Core Web Vitals ranks sites higher that perform well. Text-heavy sites that are also optimized and relevant would already perform well.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#216

Post by aabajian »

Gotta say, sometimes the results really are nice. I searched for "Land Cruiser 70." The first result is a simple, short blog post about a couple who traveled across Europe and Asia in their Troop Carrier (http://www.destoop.com/trip/1%20PREPARATION/2%20Vehicle%20sp...).

The first results on Google are Australian site for buying a LC70 (news-flash, I can't buy one in the USA). There is also a MotorTrend article about the LC70...also irrelevant since it's only sold in Australia.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#217

Post by marginalia_nu »

withinboredom wrote: post #194
marginalia_nu wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search engine doesn't actually do full text search, so maybe your query was too... unique. But do first of all verify that you haven't been hacked. There's about quarter of a million domains I've flagged that, besides their wordpress content, also host a ton of link spam crap off in some hidden folder. This reflects on the quality rating extremely negatively to the point where you may have not been indexed at all…

It’d be nice if you had a page to get the current index status for a domain.

Try a query on the form site:www.example.com ;-)

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#218

Post by foofoo4u »

snakeboy wrote: post #114

Wow, that's awesome. Great work! For a simple test, I searched "fall of the roman empire". In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources. When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle "8 Reasons Why Rome Fell", then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totall…

Good comparison. Reminds me of an analogy I like to make of today's web, which is it feels like browsing through a magazine store — full of top 10s, shallow wow-factoids, and baity material. I genuinely believe terrible results like this are making society dumber.

Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design

#219

Post by [deleted] »

klntsky wrote: post #149
snakeboy wrote: post #114

Wow, that's awesome. Great work! For a simple test, I searched "fall of the roman empire". In your search engine, I got wikipedia, followed by academic talks, chapters of books, and long-form blogs. All extremely useful resources. When I search on google, I get wikipedia, followed by a listicle "8 Reasons Why Rome Fell", then the imdb page for a movie by the same name, and then two Amazon book links, which are totall…

However, when searching for "haskell type inference algorithm" I get completely useless results.

[deleted]
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