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How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

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Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#71

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

But that web doesn’t exist anymore. The dominance of Google means all the creators and authors went elsewhere. Filter out the crap and you’ll realise that there’s very little substance left.

Maybe it does. I certainly write clean content.

And even if it doesn't (which I think it does), disincentiving bad behavior has to start somewhere

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#72
post #16

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

> why get their site to the top of the rankings if they can't put any advertisements on it? You would need to penalize any website that accepts money from users. There are a lot of SaaS companies out there writing blog spam to promote subscription products.

Some of that blog spam is genuinely useful, so you need to differentiate between content quality with brands writing content to promote their saas product.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#73

I don't mind the info boxes,... I get mad at google when I input two words into the search field, press enter, and the first few results don't include one of the words (50% of the search! .. even include the "show only links which include..."), and then uses synonym results for the second word, which gives out totally wrong results.

Adding this udm=14 param does seem to do a better job with many queries I tried. Tried "python oracle extension". Without it, the top results are all for cx_oracle, which is deprecated and has a different name now. It's still #1 with udm=14 added, but the right answer jumps up where it's at least visible on the page without scrolling down.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#74

I don't mind the info boxes,... I get mad at google when I input two words into the search field, press enter, and the first few results don't include one of the words (50% of the search! .. even include the "show only links which include..."), and then uses synonym results for the second word, which gives out totally wrong results.

"I didn't type the word for fun!", I say multiple times a day. I wish you could make verbatim search the default option.

I often don't even get that "show only links..." link. I just get results where my search terms are completely ignored.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#75

I don't mind the info boxes,... I get mad at google when I input two words into the search field, press enter, and the first few results don't include one of the words (50% of the search! .. even include the "show only links which include..."), and then uses synonym results for the second word, which gives out totally wrong results.

It infuriates me that exact match searches don't work anymore. I understand that for the average person/average query, the modern google results are better (with info boxes, AI type stuff going on), but please let me type in "I want this exact phrase, including punctuation!". I don't even care if it tells me there's nothing found and then makes some suggestions below that.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#76

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

DDG is subpar quality for any other language than English. It's not even that good in English.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#77
post #44

I want to make my own search engine, one day, with my own crawler. There is an SEO-proof way to determine what the ranking of a site should be - penalise it for each advertisement, penalise further for delivering different content to the crawler[1], allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. Basically, a site starts off with a perfect score, then gets penalised for each violation, for each dark-pattern, for each…

> allow logged-in users to down-rank a site, etc. And then you need a huge anti-bot mechanism if the search engine will get any popularity. There is money-based motivation to affect the rankings.

Karma, occasional moderation rights, and occasional meta-moderation rights worked pretty well at Slashdot, for instance. It depends heavily on user involvement though.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#79
post #24

Happy Kagi customer here and pushing it where I can. The results are much better than DDG or Brave search, which I both tried for a few months, and it's got some really nice built-in tools to bump domains up or down in results, block domains, etc.

They are also better than Google search. When I was using DDG, I still used Google from time to time if DDG's results were not helpful. After I switched to Kagi, I did the same at first but soon realized that when Kagi gives you bad results, Google's are even worse.

Re: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

#80
post #17

Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad.

> Honest question - why still use Google at all? Whenever DDG became good enough (seven? ten? years ago?) I used it exclusively. Lately I use a mix and have moved on from DDG, but I still never went back to Google and don't understand how people can tolerate it; I find the results really bad. To me, DDG's results seem relevant-ish, while Google clearly knows my profile and what I'm looking for. I get more relevant re…

Odd. I don’t get relevant results using Google at all. Sometimes I get results that are in the same topic, but I can’t remember the last time a Google result gave me a result on the first page without a VERY specific query.

Kagi knows what I want (and don’t want) because I get to tell it. My preferences are what I tell it, not what it surmises from my activity.

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