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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

#461

Post by echelon »

andrepd wrote: post #457
echelon wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Exactly.

The only reason people make content they aren't passionate about is advertising.

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

#463

Post by colinmhayes »

JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: post #330
silent_cal wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, those searches are pretty weird.

We don't search for things because they're easy to find

I mean most of my searches are probably pretty easy to find, I just don't want to go to the website I'm thinking of and click through 5 pages to get there.

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

#464

Post by kag0 »

An interesting concept and awesome work!

I searched for high pressure air (HPA) regulator trying to find a description of how one works. I didn't find that, but did find some interesting links on how they're used in scuba, and one guy's homemade gas laser.

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

#465

Post by II2II »

RattleyCooper wrote: post #389
dvogel wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty obvious if you search for any old topic that is also covered incessantly by the news. "royal family" is a good example. There's no way those news stories published an hour ago are listed first due to a high PageRank score (which necessarily depends on time to accumulate inbound links).

It depends on the content. The flip side is looking up a programming-related question and getting results from 2012. I think they take different things into account based on the thing being searched.

Even your example would depend upon the context. There are many cases where a programming question in 2021 is identical to one from 2012, along with the answer. In those instances, would you rather a shallow answer from 2021 or an indepth answer from 2012? This is not meant to imply that older answers offer greater depth, yet a heavy bias towards recent material can produce that outcome in some circumstances.

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

#466

Post by hnick »

bluGill wrote: post #391
foofoo4u wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what I really want is a true AI to search through all that and figure out the useful truth. I don't know how to do this (and of course whoever writes the AI needs to be unbiased...)

I think that is the goal, it's just what we currently have is an AI that's like a naive child who is easily tricked and distracted by clickbait.

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

#467

Post by edbaskerville »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Yeah 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 :-)

This has amazing potential. I'd encourage you to form a non-profit, turn this into something that can last as an organization without becoming what you're trying to avoid becoming. This is a good enough start that I bet you could raise a sizeable startup fund very soon from a combination of crowdfunding and foundation grants—I bet the Sloan Foundation would love this!

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

#468

Post by MaysonL »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #61
asah wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love it, kudos! This is great for developers and others who Just Need Answers and not shopping or entertainment. If you're looking for feedback, both from a UI design and utility standpoint, you might consider "inlining" results from selected sites, e.g. Wikipedia, stacked change, etc. Having worked on search for a long time, inlining (onebox etc) is a big reason users choose Google, and that channelers fail to get t…

If Google starts showing interesting text-heavy links instead of vapid listicles and storefronts, I have accomplished everything I ever could dream of.

Google Info - for when you're looking for information, not shopping advice or lists!

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

#469

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

rchaud wrote: post #322
foofoo4u wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Its the "healthy web" Mozilla^1 and Google keep telling their blog audiences about. :)

1 Accept quid pro quo to send all queries to Google by default

If what these companies were telling their readers was true, i.e., that advertising is "essential" for the web to survive, then how are the sites returned by this search engine for text-heavy websites (that are not discoverable through Google, the default search engine for Chrome, Firefox, etc.) able to remain online. Advertising is essential for the "tech" company middleman business to survive.

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