Earlier quoted context omitted.
>followed by a listicle "8 Reasons Why Rome Fell" but arent you curious about the 7th reason? it will surprise you!
You wont believe how Claudius looks today!
Doctors HATE him!!!
A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
581–590 of 735 posts
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search engines whose revenue is based on advertising will ultimately be tuned to steer you to the ad foodchain. All the incentives are aligned towards and all the metrics ultimately in service of, profit for advertisers. Not in the 99% of people who can convinced to consume something by ads? Welp, screw you.
Search engines should be something you pay for. Surely search engine powerusers can afford to pay for such a service. If Google makes $1 per user per month or something, that's not too high a bar to get over.
Search engines should be like libraries. At least some tiny sliver of the billions we spend on education and research should go to, you know, actually organizing the world's information and making it universally available.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this design decision. It pays you back for choosing your search terms carefully.
I’m not against a stemmer, actually, just against the aggressive concordances (?) that Google now employs, like when it shows me X in Banach spaces (the classical, textbook case) when I’m specifically searching for X in Fréchet spaces (the generalization I want to find but am not sure exists); of course Banach spaces and Fréchet spaces are almost exclusively encountered in the same context, but it doesn’t mean that o…
English is more the outlier in regard to Germanic languages, try German or Finnish, with their wonderful compounds :)
https://e.humanities.uva.nl/publications/2004/kamp_lang04.pd...
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not certain what DDG actually uses (wasn’t it Bing?), but in my experience from the last couple of months it ignores quotes substantially more eagerly than Google does. For this particular term, a little bit of domain knowledge helps: even without quotes, brst becchi , brst formalism , brst quantization or perhaps bv brst will get you reasonable results. (I could swear Google corrected brst quantization to best q…
It would not be a difficult problem if they allowed the " " operator to work as they claim it does, or revive the + operator.
In English, maybe; in Russian, I frequently find myself reaching for the nonexistent “morphology but not synonyms” operator (as the same noun phrase can take a different form depending on whether it is the subject or the object of a verb, or even on which verb it is the object of); even German should have the same problem AFAIU, if a bit milder. I don’t dare think about how speakers of agglunative languages (Finnish, Turkish, Malayalam) suffer.
(DDG docs do say it supports +... and even +"...", but I can’t seem to get them to do what I want.)
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#585Yeah 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 :-)
I love this idea, and admire the work you put into it. I'm a fan of long reads and historical non-fiction, and Google's results are truly garbage. I have a criticism that I think may pertain to the ranking methodology. I searched for "discovery of Australia". Among the top results were: * A site claiming that the biblical flood was caused by Earth colliding with a comet (with several other pages from that site also m…
those three pages sound pretty interesting, I don't see this as a problem
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#586Yeah 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 :-)
Pretty neat!!! You may already be aware of this, but the page doesn't seem to be formatted correctly on mobile. The content shows in a single thin column in the middle.
Fennec F-Droid on Android 11 has some rendering issues.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#587Wow, 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…
Wow I used "personality test" and actually got useful articles about personality theory. I'll actually use this!
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#588How does this have 2.5K upvotes when every single HN related project needs JS and a quad core CPU (for the browser to open a blank page) to view a paragraph of text?
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#589Are there any technical infos about the search engine? Found some information here https://memex.marginalia.nu/projects/edge/about.gmi Author said they threw it together on consumer hardware. How big is the index? (TB used or entries) how is it realised? I'm pretty much interested in this since I myself am crawling some pages for my own "search index". Oh and thx for making and posting. Added it as a keyword to firef…
The index is tiny, not even a terabyte. Right now it's a few hundred gigabytes for ~20 million URLs. But it's stored in an extremely dense binary format.
Honestly you may just want to roll your own solution for storing a ton of files. If you don't need a general-purpose filesystem, but an append-only archive with extra metadata, then you can cut a lot of corners. Like if you have a file system that is fixed-size and append-only, you can build it in a way no off-the-shelf stuff can.
This line of thinking is a large part of why my index is so small and fast. I have a lot of special built data-structures that are built for their exact use case. Like a fixed size append-only hash map that uses mapped memory and can in theory be larger than the system memory. Very good for a search engine, absolutely useless almost everywhere else.
Re: A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you need to approach it more like grep than google. It's a forgotten art, dealing with this type of dumb search engine. Like if you search for "How do I make a steak", you aren't going to get very good results. But a better query is "Steak Recipe", as that is at least a conceivable H1-tag.
So, you are re-implementing Altavista, Lycos and other old search engines. They used the naive approach: you searched for "steak", and they would bring the pages which included the word "steak". The problem is that people could fool these engines by adding a long sequence like "steak, steak, steak, steak, steak, steak" to their site -- to pretend that they were the most authoritative page about steaks. Google's big i…
Effective Google search is also history.
I understand they are trying to maximize ad revenue and search does work very well for people who are looking for products or services.
But it no longer works well for finding information that is even slightly obscure.