There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it seems they still are

Re:There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it... by tgb on Monday July 02, 2018 @08:09AM (#17440966)

I wasn't really thinking a niche topic but a niche use-case. Google is bad at doing literal, verbatim string searches these days and all I want sometimes is like Google 2005ish era search, just PageRank based and no modern machine learning, etc. You can have it simpler than Google did at the time since SEO against your niche engine is unlikely, so tech wise you might be more like 1998 Google. The main bottleneck seems to be what others here are suggesting: there's just too much web to index these days unless you're Bing-scale or bigger.

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Re:There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it... by wutbrodo on Monday July 02, 2018 @04:57PM (#17445283)

> Google is bad at doing literal, verbatim string searches these days and all I want sometimes is like Google 2005ish era search, just PageRank based and no modern machine learning, etc

You can get most of the way to this with the verbatim option, but I think they make it difficult to make the default.

> By using the Verbatim tool Google will not make the following changes: • Personalizing your search using websites you have visited before; • Including synonyms of your search terms; • Automatic spelling corrections; • Searching for words with the same stem e.g. “Shopping” when searched for “shop”; • Finding results that match similar terms to those in your query.

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Re:There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it... by auganov on Monday July 02, 2018 @12:19PM (#17442952)

Well that's sort of what I'm thinking of too. I'm talking about the idea that this might be doable by limiting topical scope. So for example you'd only index some portion of tech related sites.

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