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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

#661

Post by digaozao »

HPsquared wrote: post #643
jamra wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a guess, but I believe that they use machine learning and rank it by the clicks. I took some coursera courses and Andrew Ng sort of suggested that as their strategy. The problem is that clickbait and low effort articles could be good enough to get the click, but low effort enough to drag society into the gutter. As time passes, the system is gamified more and more where the least effort for the most clic…

It sounds like the problem is, the search engine has no way to measure satisfaction after the click.

I've heard google would guess with bounce rate. Or another way, if the user clicks on LinkedIn website A, after a few moments keeps trying other linksw/related search. It would mean it was not valuable.

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

#662

Post by more-coffee »

Not sure how to contact you in case of possible bugs/problems, just going to drop a comment here. Was trying a bunch of "define:" queries and noticed something small;

This works https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina... This doesn't, or at least it's empty https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina...

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

#663

Post by Syzygies »

After a few experiments, I'd compare this to panning for gold in a river others ignore because the yield isn't good. You will find nuggets you would have otherwise missed, but you'll work for it. This engine is likely best used to supplement other options.

What set aside Google from its competitors was its use of eigenvalue weights. I don't sense a robust weighting system in use here.

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

#665

Post by marginalia_nu »

more-coffee wrote: post #662

Not sure how to contact you in case of possible bugs/problems, just going to drop a comment here. Was trying a bunch of "define:" queries and noticed something small; This works https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina... This doesn't, or at least it's empty https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=define%3Ahallucina...

Yeah it's probably not the most complete dictionary. I'm using Wiktionary-data. There might be the occasional gaps and vandalism.

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

#666

Post by agencies »

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 :-)

I continue to want a communal set of 50-100 million urls and data that are "good" (i.e. for any value of good and more complete than common crawl) that are accessible enough to be easy to work with that can be used to experiment with different web search tech. There are enough separate problems to tackle in web search that breaking it down would maybe move the needle. We have lots of kaggle competitions about ranking, but using closed data. What other types of kaggle projects would help web search?

What can we do to foster a sustainable bazaar of projects to make it easier to build web search engines?

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

#667

Post by powerchord »

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 is really cool! A spacer between the links would help my old eyes; I keep getting lost in which link goes with which description. :-)

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

#669

Post by infogulch »

Not to overemphasize meta commentary, but damn 3200 points, 650 comments in 2 days -- this is one of the highest rated posts I can remember. Seems HN readers are very interested in alternatives to the current search hegemony and the kind of low-quality junk articles that litter it.

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

#670

Post by artificial »

foxfluff wrote: post #606
artificial wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Yup, and taking payments online was awful but privacy was more of a thing. In South Korea ActiveX was required until recently. https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/south_korea_activex_c...
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