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

#601

Post by random314 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #438

random314 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arrows theorem simply doesn't apply here. We don't need our personalized search results to satisfy the majority.

But in both cases you face the problem of aggregating preferences of many into one. In one case you are combining personal preferences in the other case aggregating ‘preferences’ expressed by search engines.

But search engines aren't voting to maximize the chances that their preferred candidate shows up on top. The mixed ranker has no requirement to satisfy Arrows integrity constraints. It has to satisfy the end user, which is quite possible in theory.

Conditions the mixed ranker doesn't have to satisfy "ranking while also meeting a specified set of criteria: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives"

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

#602

Post by godshatter » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

Instead of looking for something specific, I decided to try a category of some sort to see what came up. Thinking about Jeopardy categories, I tried "potent potables" and found a lot of random pages that may or may not have made sense given that category but that I had a lot of fun reading. Definitely a win for me.

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

#603

Post by AlexCoventry » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

I don't really care about website's design, as long as it gets out of the way of me reading it.

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

#604

Post by marginalia_nu » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #225

asjdflakjsdf wrote: post #203

You should monetise this with amazon affiliate links that are relevant to each search. And then use that money to keep this project going. Google is fantastic, but it has become something different from what it was, the company and the product. It is so refreshing to see a modern tool that encourages exploration of the actual world wide web.

I might add a donate button or something if people want to help support the project, hardware isn't cheap and all. But I have a job and decent income. I think if this search engine became the way I earned money, it would influence the project in a bad way, and corrupt its purpose, which is to help people explore the less-commercial internet.

I added a patron, and huh, a few people are actually donating. I don't really know what to say. Thanks!

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

#605

Post by SimplGy » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

Searched for “chocolate chip cookie recipe”

First result had a recipe I could see both recipe and directions in a single page, no ads, no scrolling, no fake seo anecdotes about kids and grandmas.

(Pls make the search query box fit small mobile devices)

Great project idea!

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

#606

Post by foxfluff » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

artificial wrote: post #508

fullsend wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Unfortunately many large corporate websites through which you pay bills, order tickets, etc. are becoming infested with JS widgets and bulky, slow interfaces. These are hard to avoid.

Conversely no software to install. Browser as a platform. Don’t have to boot to Windows to pay your bills with activex for example

The mostly JS-less web was fine, fast, and reliable 20 years ago and I never had ActiveX.

I hear stories about Flash and ActiveX but I literally never needed these to shop or pay bills online. Payments also didn't require scripts from a dozen domains and four redirects..

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

#607

Post by acchow » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

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…

If this search engine ever takes off, the listicle writers will just start optimizing for it too, right?

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

#608

Post by collinmanderson » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

BenoitP wrote: post #221

LanceH wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if we could pipe search engines.

Definitely; We could create a meta search engine that queries them all, in desktop application format. Let's name it after a famous old scientist, and maybe add the year to prove it's modern: Galileo 2021.

Brave browser currently has "Google fallback" which sometimes mixes in Google search results with Brave's own search engine.

https://search.brave.com/help/google-fallback

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

#609

Post by scopio918 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

All search engines favors more text and less graphics.

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

#610

Post by wolverine876 » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

AQXt wrote: post #562

marginalia_nu wrote: post #437

Earlier 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…

> 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.

I don't see a lot of people investing in SEO to boost their Marginalia results.