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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

#71

Post by prionassembly »

The website itself seems generated with some kind of kick-ass generator from template files (.gmi?)

I feel like I'm stuck with Wordpress.com because it brings me some traffic (whereas something hand-rolled on nsfspeech or digital ocean or whatever would literally be off the edge of the web), but the structure of that is so cool.

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

#72

Post by lbriner »

My pet peeve with search results is simply that there are ancient technical results that in many cases are irrelevant. If I am searching for a Window error message, I don't want some old forum post from 2001, especially if it didn't have any answers!

What would be cool would be for people who host old stuff to "archive" it at some point so it doesn't appear in normal results, only if you tick "include archives".

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

#74

Post by NhanH »

prionassembly wrote: post #71

The website itself seems generated with some kind of kick-ass generator from template files (.gmi?) I feel like I'm stuck with Wordpress.com because it brings me some traffic (whereas something hand-rolled on nsfspeech or digital ocean or whatever would literally be off the edge of the web), but the structure of that is so cool.

That would be gemini protocol!

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

#75

Post by artembugara »

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 :-)

Nice, what are you using to crawl the web?

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

#76

Post by huijzer »

prionassembly wrote: post #71

The website itself seems generated with some kind of kick-ass generator from template files (.gmi?) I feel like I'm stuck with Wordpress.com because it brings me some traffic (whereas something hand-rolled on nsfspeech or digital ocean or whatever would literally be off the edge of the web), but the structure of that is so cool.

You can easily do proper SEO with static site generators too. Even more, static sites can be hosted via GitHub or GitLab Pages, Netlify or CloudFlare and in all cases the speed will outperform Wordpress in almost all cases. Also, you have way more control over the output than with Wordpress.

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

#77

Post by marginalia_nu »

cyral wrote: post #48

I tried a few queries and got extremely irrelevant results

It really depends on what you search for. A major drawback is that there needs to be text-heavy sites to find, in order for the search engine to find them.

Compare for example the results for "Duke Nukem 3D" with those for "Cyberpunk 2077".

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

#78

Post by mountain_peak »

xipho wrote: post #50

Fascinating. I studied an "obscure" group of insects. My go-to search term to test an engine is their family name as it is a rarely used word and I know most (all?) of the major data sources that have accumulated data on it. When Wolfram Alpha added species names, I checked with the name, boring, Duck Duck, boring, Google (well we know Google isn't for search anymore, it's absolutely horrible) boring, Bing, boring...…

Likewise, I co-maintain the only "fan" site on one of my all-time favourite composers/performers, and gave the engine a shot with a unique string query. While my text-heavy WP-driven site didn't seem to make the cut, the results were highly relevant in that they were links to former band members and collaborators - a couple of which I didn't realize existed. That being said, there were a few sites (including my own) I expected to be returned, but no dice. Still, a fascinating experiment that many at HN have been clamouring for.

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

#79

Post by giancarlostoro »

trutannus wrote: post #70
xipho wrote: post #50

Fascinating. I studied an "obscure" group of insects. My go-to search term to test an engine is their family name as it is a rarely used word and I know most (all?) of the major data sources that have accumulated data on it. When Wolfram Alpha added species names, I checked with the name, boring, Duck Duck, boring, Google (well we know Google isn't for search anymore, it's absolutely horrible) boring, Bing, boring...…

> well we know Google isn't for search anymore Do you suggest anything better? As far as I can tell, all the other search engines are either repackaged Bing (ie: DuckDuck), or are just as bad.

Not sure, but I remember when Google could find literally anything. Then they started adding a bunch of exceptions and crapped out their quality. I wonder how insanely different results would be to get the older Google Engine from the 2000s search result wise.

I now have to play games with Google to find things. I feel like I do less than I used to for some reason.

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