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Teclis – Non-commercial web search

teclis.com

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Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#31

Post by dannywarner »

fernly wrote: post #21
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/

+1 for andisearch also. Totally different approach. Have barely seen it talked about on here. The results are dope, however. I very much appreciate marginalia as well. I applaud the programmers making new and interesting tools in this space.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#32

Post by researchers »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #28
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-l…

Not OP but I am working on a search engine with vector ranking. Why do you say that vector search would help with narrow queries? In my experience, semantic search helps broaden the query to search for adjacent ideas without exact term marches.

Hybrid approaches that use vector search for broad matches and rerank using BM25 could be what you’re looking for. See https://blog.vespa.ai/efficient-open-domain-question-answeri...

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#33

Post by marginalia_nu »

researchers wrote: post #25

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 ki…

I'm also very interested in new paradigms to explore the internet. I've built a sort of explorable graph of adjacent websites based on my search engine database, was on Show HN a while back:

https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/news.ycombinator.com

If you click 'similar' under any site, you get a list of its neighbors.

I think it would be neat to extend the metaphor not to just websites, but ... I dunno, something more general, links, topics, what have you. Like a browsable web of connected things. Maybe like with a bookmarking or annotation system. I think it could be super neat. Still a bit of a hand-wavy idea, but I want to build it, or someone else to build it.

I do think the search box is a bit limiting.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#34

Post by marginalia_nu »

researchers wrote: post #32
marginalia_nu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-l…

Not OP but I am working on a search engine with vector ranking. Why do you say that vector search would help with narrow queries? In my experience, semantic search helps broaden the query to search for adjacent ideas without exact term marches. Hybrid approaches that use vector search for broad matches and rerank using BM25 could be what you’re looking for. See https://blog.vespa.ai/efficient-open-domain-question-ans…

> Why do you say that vector search would help with narrow queries?

I was just asking whether he'd seen better results. I haven't experimented very much with it on my search engine. It's as crude as they get, and in part I want to see how far I can push old fashioned 1970s search algorithms :P

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#35

Post by researchers »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33
researchers wrote: post #25

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 ki…

I'm also very interested in new paradigms to explore the internet. I've built a sort of explorable graph of adjacent websites based on my search engine database, was on Show HN a while back: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/news.ycombinator.com If you click 'similar' under any site, you get a list of its neighbors. I think it would be neat to extend the metaphor not to just websites, but ... I dunno, something mo…

Yep, graph structure of topics enables users to wander around topic space. Good for less directed, more exploratory searching.

Another graph that is useful is the graph of people -> topic clusters. See https://twitterverse.net/ . Such a graph can help rank content from people deeply invested in a particular topic, and its hard to fake because they would presumably have to trick all their peers about their expertise

We'll have our own Show HN soon but it's great to see similar ideas bouncing around. Would love to connect over email to learn more about your thoughts.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#36

Post by marginalia_nu »

researchers wrote: post #35
marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also very interested in new paradigms to explore the internet. I've built a sort of explorable graph of adjacent websites based on my search engine database, was on Show HN a while back: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/news.ycombinator.com If you click 'similar' under any site, you get a list of its neighbors. I think it would be neat to extend the metaphor not to just websites, but ... I dunno, something mo…

Yep, graph structure of topics enables users to wander around topic space. Good for less directed, more exploratory searching. Another graph that is useful is the graph of people -> topic clusters. See https://twitterverse.net/ . Such a graph can help rank content from people deeply invested in a particular topic, and its hard to fake because they would presumably have to trick all their peers about their expertise W…

Yeah, I think there's real room to build something very cool and useful in the space of exploration and discovery.

Do shoot me an email, my address is in my profile.

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#38

Post by robmerki »

This is such a fantastic search engine. Obviously not perfect, but the search results are information rather than blogspam/ads/etc. Breath of fresh air.

Funnily enough I somehow ranked #1 for "ADHD" but I don't know what's particularly special about my landing page. Does your crawler look prioritize/crawl HN by any chance?

Re: Teclis – Non-commercial web search

#39

Post by WhitneyLand »

Beyond search results, a significant amount of googles value is in its “apps”, or whatever they call the functional snippets like calculator, translator etc. built into the engine.

I wonder if it would make sense to have cross platform plug-ins, so that all of these interesting nascent search engine efforts could automatically benefit from new plug-ins and an ecosystem could start to develop.

It’s great to have an alternative but obviously it’s such a huge effort the efficiency of development will be important.

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