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Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

searchmysite.net

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Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#41

Post by Sophira »

p3rls wrote: post #40
_puk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites are ranked higher when they have no ads. Fully open source. That's a good starting point..

So then definitionally not independent then because their funding comes from elsewhere

According to the site, the funding comes from its "Search as a Service" feature[0], where anybody can pay them in order to have a search service focused on their site (which does not have to be in the public index and thus doesn't have to be personal/independent).

So, in the sense that the funding (aims to) comes from larger companies, you are correct. It's not VC, but it does seem like it could end up relying on payments from large companies, making it potentially vulnerable.

[0] https://searchmysite.net/pages/about/#search-as-a-service

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#42

Post by p3rls »

Sophira wrote: post #41
p3rls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then definitionally not independent then because their funding comes from elsewhere

According to the site, the funding comes from its "Search as a Service" feature[0], where anybody can pay them in order to have a search service focused on their site (which does not have to be in the public index and thus doesn't have to be personal/independent). So, in the sense that the funding (aims to) comes from larger companies, you are correct. It's not VC, but it does seem like it could end up relying on pay…

That too, but I was referring to the sites in the search themselves. They are not independents but in the pay of someone else if they're not generating revenue.

As someone with a commercial digital garden with ads (and a $3/mo sub for the ad-adverse) I like to point out the tension in that whenever possible

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#43

Post by m-i-l »

Sophira wrote: post #41
p3rls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then definitionally not independent then because their funding comes from elsewhere

According to the site, the funding comes from its "Search as a Service" feature[0], where anybody can pay them in order to have a search service focused on their site (which does not have to be in the public index and thus doesn't have to be personal/independent). So, in the sense that the funding (aims to) comes from larger companies, you are correct. It's not VC, but it does seem like it could end up relying on pay…

That's right. Most search engines are funded by advertising, where there is the clear conflict of interest[0], not to mention incentive for spam etc. Alternative models include a subscription fee (which I don't think would work for a small niche search like this) and donations (which may or may not be sustainable). Looking through some of the support forums for the big search engines, I'm pretty sure that enough site owners would pay a fee for support to pay the running costs for a large search engine, although for a smaller search engine like this there needs to be something more than just support, hence the search as a service features.

[0] "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers", to quote Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" paper from 1998.

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#44

Post by m-i-l »

1dom wrote: post #34
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my imagination, I think I prefer a search engine which searches for what I ask, rather than one which tries to guess what I really want. It's been so long since I had one that really worked that way that I might turn out to hate it though.

Best of both worlds: > No results found for "digiatl". Did you mean to search for "digital" instead?

At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one day someone reported an unfortunate edge case which caused a bit of a panic - if you searched "annual report” it returned "did you mean anal report?" (we were in the finance sector rather than medical sector, but there were a lot more documents in the corpus containing words like analysts, analysis, analytics etc). Anyway, the point is yes, it is great to have that sort of functionality, but it does come at a cost, and a small project like this might prefer to keep it simple.

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#45

Post by m-i-l »

1dom wrote: post #36

I like this, thank you! I just lost an hour of time to the exact sort of random but considered personal websites that I think made the Web great in the first place.

Thanks for the great feedback:-) This is what searchmysite.net is attempting to do - help make "surfing the web" a fun leisure activity once more. It is good to see more people seem to get that point now. When it was on HN nearly 3 years ago[0], many people saw a search box and thought it must be a Google replacement, but were disappointed to find it wasn't. And I guess now more than ever it is useful to have a way of finding content on the web which has been made by humans rather than AI.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395231

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#47

Post by 1dom »

m-i-l wrote: post #44
1dom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best of both worlds: > No results found for "digiatl". Did you mean to search for "digital" instead?

At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one day someone reported an unfortunate edge case which caused a bit of a panic - if you searched "annual report” it returned "did you mean anal report?" (we were in the finance sector…

Generating suggestions from something other than what your users have already given you is inevitably going to result in something different and potentially offensive being shown to them.

One solution is to offer suggestion from a list of previous searches.

Also, that is very much a big corporate problem: I imagine most searchmysite users are mature and stable enough not to have a melt down at the word "anal".

But I agree with your point, sometimes seemingly small features take a disproportionate amount of support, and this could be one of them!

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#49

Post by busymom0 »

m-i-l wrote: post #44
1dom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best of both worlds: > No results found for "digiatl". Did you mean to search for "digital" instead?

At a big corporate, we had an Apache Solr based search which had some reasonably clever lemmatization and stats analysis and spell check config to suggest alternative searches if not many results were found for the original query, but one day someone reported an unfortunate edge case which caused a bit of a panic - if you searched "annual report” it returned "did you mean anal report?" (we were in the finance sector…

Couldn't you just add an extra step to check if the suggestion is offensive, then don't show it?

Re: Search My Site – open-source search engine for personal and independent websites

#50

Post by [deleted] »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #22

Other sites: - https://nownownow.com/ - https://omg.lol/ - https://indieweb.org/ - https://ooh.directory/ - https://neocities.org/ - https://aboutideasnow.com/ - https://indieblog.page/ - https://wiby.me/ - https://80.style/ Generally I crawl the internet to find pages. The result is in https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database . Personal pages are tagged with "personal" tag.

[deleted]
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