A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by _blu » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 8:49 AM UTC

mountainboy wrote: post #277

lucideer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to prefer Wikipedia for movies. The exception is actor headshots if I'm trying to identify someone, which Wikipedia lacks for licensing reasons, but otherwise Wikipedia tends to be better than IMDB for most needs. Wikipedia has an IMDB link on every article anyway. Another need I guess might be reviews, for which RT or MC are better than IMDB: not sure if either of those two will fare better than IMDB in this…

For me, imdb was much better when they had user comments/discussion. I never even posted on it myself, but browsing the discussions one could learn all sorts of trivia, inside info, speculation, etc about each movie. Since they (inexplicably) killed that feature, I rarely even visit anymore. Your right, for many purposes wikipedia is better, especially for TV series episode lists with summaries.

Especially for old and lesser known movies, the discussion board for the movie was a brilliant addition that could give the movie an extra dimension. Context is very important in order to understand, and ulitmately enjoy something.

I think they removed it in part because new movies, like star wars and superhero movies, had alot of negative activity.

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

#522

Post by addandsubtract » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 8:52 AM UTC

MaysonL wrote: post #468

marginalia_nu wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Google info? Can you give me a sample query of what you mean?

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

#523

Post by jokoon » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 8:56 AM UTC

I don't even want to imagine how google and other search engines crawl websites that make heavy usage of react or other ajax stuff. I don't want to be that guy.

I wonder if some browser engineers are trying to have some ideas on how to find a solution on this. Personally, I would just make a browser that breaks backward compatibility, remove old features, etc. I guess browsers would be much lighter, fast and simple if some hard choices were made.

Mozilla already decided to break some websites with the strict cookie policy. I wish they would do the same for everything else that sucks on the modern web.

I honestly don't think I have much respect for "web developers". In a way I want mobile apps to kill the modern web, just to prove a point.

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

#524

Post by tejtm » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

There is an open standard way for an engine like this to provide a mechanism for your standards aware browser to add the site as a alternative search with a click.

That way I would not have to remember or bookmark just use my search bar as normal and choose which engine for this query or set it as default.

[]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/OpenSearch

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

#525

Post by AltruisticGapHN » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:15 AM UTC

I like the idea. However results take too much space vertically it's slow and cumbersome to scan through them.

I think it would benefit from using a responsive layout, allow the text expand to a wide 1000+ px, make the font smaller, so the excerpt can fit one or two lines below the links.

Google has problems but their search results layout is easy to scan.

Otherwise I genuinely wish I would use it, because the Google search's "self referential reality bubble" is really annoying.

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

#526

Post by Ajef » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

Nition wrote: post #368

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…

The Wikipedia link at the top is always given. It would maybe be good to make it a little clearer that it's not one of the true results.

I think this is just because of terms you have searched. In my test-searches Wikipedia has not come up once in first position (i think the highest was 3rd in the list).

Here's what I've tried with a few variations: golang generics proposal, machine learning transformer, covid hospitalization germany

[edit] formatting

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

#527

Post by hop34s3w » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

If the website is targeted towards international audience then its nice to have the first page links to content in english. All the four links in the main page https://www.marginalia.nu/ have links to non-english content which is not useful.

Disclaimer: I am not a native english speaker. English is my second language.

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

#528

Post by II2II » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

valvar wrote: post #499

II2II wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're using tools/languages that change rapidly (like Kotlin, in my case), syntax from a few years ago will often be outdated.

Yes, yet there are programming questions that go beyond "how do I do X in language Y" or "how do I do X with library Y". The language and library specific questions are the ones where I would be less inclined to want additional depth anyhow, well, provided they aren't dependent upon some language or library specific implementation detail.

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

#529

Post by dspillett » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #250

run-types wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've basically never been taken to a recipe without a rambling preamble from Google. While food blogs may serve two audiences, a long introduction seems to be a requirement to appear in the top Google search results.

Personally, I think that has a lot more to do with the fact that Google killed the Recipe Databases. There did used to be a few startups that tried to be Recipe Aggregators with advertising based business models, that would show recipes and then link to source blogs and/or cookbooks, and in the brief period where they existed Google scraped them entirely and showed entire recipes on search results and ate their ad re…

Such databases would get battered by demands to remove content these days, if not already back then. No one want a database listing their stuff for ad revenue like that because many wouldn't follow the links so see their adverts or be subject to their tracking.

A couple of browser add-ons specifically geared around trimming recipe pages down have been taken down due to similar complaints.

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

#530

Post by LightG » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #486

BenoitP wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, but so far no one got it. There was such an app in the early 2000's, before Google went mainstream, and Altavista-like engines were not good: Copernic 2000. I guess I'm officially old now.

I was always a dogpile user :p

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