Obligatory https://wiby.me/ plug. If you're looking for a decent minimalist website search engine, this fits the bill pretty well.
A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
451–460 of 735 posts
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#452Wow, 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…
Cool, it appears that the trend towards JS may be causing self-selection -- if a page has a high amount of JS, it is highly unlikely to contain anything of value.
Was that ever in doubt?
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of what I wanted to show with this project is that there is no such thing as an objective search engine. Even seemingly irrelevant technological decisions drastically impact the narrative.
Well the focus on text content isn't the only technical difference here. Google is obviously weighing hundreds of signals in its search results that your engine is not accounting for. These omitted signals are also relevant.
Google is actively fighting the spread of disinformation. You can see this clearly in the forced row of COVID PSA links on the YouTube front page that's been up for the last year regardless of whether you have any history viewing such content. There is manual intervention going on to prevent the garbage their normal algorithms will automatically surface. This is the greatest tragedy of the internet in that it allows people with crazy notions to find each other and build echo chambers with the aid of unbiased ML.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#454Lets get the the internet great place foe knowledge again. I really loved the engine ans tried for different terms and very happy. Goos job
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#455Wow this is immediately useful If you figure out some sort of funding model (maybe even just Patreon) I could totally see this as a viable side project Already discovered this recipe site: https://based.cooking/ I love how adding recipes is through pull requests: https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/based.cooking/pulls
Thank you for this, it really makes me love the web and the people making things like this, Forked!
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
The context matters. I'd happily read "Top 10" lists on a website if the site itself was dedicated to that one thing. "Top 10 Prog Rock albums", while a lazy, SEO-bait title, would at least be credible if it were on a music-oriented website. But no, these stories all come from cookie-cutter "new media" blog sites, written by an anonymous content writer who's repackaged Wikipedia/Discogs info into Buzzfeed-style copy…
This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again. It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let's say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-…
The new evergreen is refreshed sludge for bottom dollar. College kids stealing Reddit comments or moving around paragraphs from old articles. Or linking to linked blogs that link elsewhere.
It's all stamped with Google Ads, of course, and then Google ranks these pages high enough to rake in eyeballs and ad dollars.
Also there's the fact that each year, the average webpage picks up two more video elements / ad players, one or two more ad overlays, a cookie banner, and half a dozen banner/interstitials. It's 3-5% content spread thinly over an ad engine.
The Google web is about squeezing ads down your throat.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
This got me thinking that maybe one of the other big reasons for this is that the algorithms prioritize newer pages over older pages. This produces the problem where instead of covering a topic and refining it over time, the incentive is to repackage it over and over again. It reminds me of an annoyance I have with the Kindle store. If I wanted to find a book on, let's say, Psychology, there is no option to find all-…
The new evergreen is refreshed sludge for bottom dollar. College kids stealing Reddit comments or moving around paragraphs from old articles. Or linking to linked blogs that link elsewhere. It's all stamped with Google Ads, of course, and then Google ranks these pages high enough to rake in eyeballs and ad dollars. Also there's the fact that each year, the average webpage picks up two more video elements / ad players…
Really makes you wonder: you play whack a mole and tackle the symptoms with initiatives like this search engine. But the root of that problem and many many others is the same: advertising. Why don't we try to tackle that?
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#458I like it. Coincidentally, the other day I was daydreaming about a search engine that favors sites that are updated less frequently. The thought being, the kinds of labors of love that characterized the 1990s Web that I still sometimes miss are still out there, it's just harder to find them amidst the flood of SEO dreck. So perhaps they could be made discoverable again with the help of a contrarian search engine that…
Try this https://wiby.me/
Clicking 'Surprise me' gave me an interesting article from 1994 http://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bucket.html
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#459Yeah so this is my project. It's very much a work in progress, but occasionally I think it works remarkably well for something I cobbled together alone out of consumer hardware and home-made code :-)
is there a json endpoint ? I'd love to make an emacs bridge :)
Seconded, I’d like to incorporate it into a project of mine.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#460This is great. The results for my search were like a suggested reading list.