For years, my trick for finding interesting content was to go to, say, the 7th page of Google results, and start there. This doesn't work anymore -- it's SEO-optimised listicle blog posts all the way down.

My trick now is to use Twitter to discover interesting people, and follow them there. Granted, it's not a search engine, but it's at least given me the ability to discover weird things again.

I agree on the original issue but social media tailored to people's own bubble is probably not a good source for enlightenment either...

I think it depends how you use it.

One of the things I enjoy doing on Twitter is posting up something I'm working on, and then clicking through to all the profiles of the people who like, comment, or retweet my work. I stumble across an incredibly diverse range of people by doing this, many with conflicting opinions to my own, and many who belong to strange subcultures that I don't understand, but who were all drawn to my work for one reason or another.

I think there's definitely a danger of crafting a bubble for yourself if you choose to use it that way, but as a tool for discovering people making cool stuff who otherwise wouldn't cut through the noise on something like Google search, I haven't found anything better.

Many times I have thought about what could happen if Twitter asked you to recommend up to 3-5 people you value, and write a tweet-sized (or shorted) recommendation.

Over time you would get a 'pagerank for people' and could do awesome stuff with that, like 'You don't know XYZ, but 3 people you trust trust her, and this is what they tell about her:' ...

Until that gets screwed using social engineering and people optimising for being affiliated with people writing them good reviews.

You know, for people with Klout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klout

I was about to ask about dmoz.org. But apparently it's dead. We could probably do something with bookmark sharing à la Delicious. Good dead things for a better future.

Heh, I was trying to do research on coronaviruses (of which COVID-19 is one of many coronaviruses), but Google sanitized the result and only showed me "official" COVID-19 resources and buried the broader coronavirus resources.

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

COVID-19 isn't a coronavirus, it's the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming this isn't just pedantry, especially since you're getting downvotes (because I assume everyone thinks this is just pedantic correction) I looked it up.

In the context of "trying to do research on coronaviruses" your comment appears to be not only correct but an important distinction, rather than the pedantry it appears to be.

From Wikipedia: "...more lethal varieties [of coronaviruses] can cause SARS, MERS, and COVID-19."

And...

"Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2] is the strain of coronavirus..."

I learned something today!

I also had this epiphany awhile back and what helped me understand the difference was to think about how HIV (the virus) causes AIDS (the disease).

Further, CoViD-19 literally stands for: Co[rona] Vi[rus] D[isease] - [discovered in 20]19 - "D" standing for disease caused by this particular strain.

To be honest, I was a bit disappointed when I found out, though I admit now it's a little refreshing to have be so simply named.

Which can be further abbreviated as C19. I have seen this in personal chats and wonder how long it will be before it gets into newspaper headlines where space is at a premium in print editions.

I already see it in publications but more frequently see the variant C-19.

Complaining about pedantry is the new pedantry.

I know you are relaying the public information accurately, but I wish authorities pushed better names. Like calling the virus "the virus that we know has a corona and causes these symptoms" and the disease "the disease caused by this virus that has a corona and that causes these symptoms" is circular. Also, it is not true that it is entirely a respiratory syndrome. There are serious non-respiratory symptoms, extent of which we are to discover. Finally, if it is a syndrome causing virus, by definition we wouldn't have the crisp boundaries of a disease around it, which indeed we don't.

If these were names for services and classes that came in a code review, how many would really approve?

American media calls both disease and virus "corona". They seem to care little about such details.

I've been using "covid". Don't know if it will catch on, but I feel it's important for efficiency's sake to try to save one letter.

[retracted] and I hope this is just a misunderstanding. As the director of the World Health Organization (WHO) said, 2019-nCoV is a novel (new) coronavirus.[0] The CDC defines coronavirus as a virus that was not previously known — check the FAQ, “what is a novel coronavirus?”[0.5]

They changed the name of this coronavirus to reflect the disease more accurately to COVID-19.[1]

The CDC has a list of other coronavirus’ that have existed.[2]

0: https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1227297754499764230?s=20

0.5: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html

1: https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...

2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/types.html

——

Edit: Since there seems to be a misunderstanding from everybody’s part on this as it’s referred to as both and often interchangeably in a mainstream setting, take a look at John Hopkins guide: https://www.hopkinsguides.com/hopkins/view/Johns_Hopkins_ABX...

No, the comment above is correct, and your own links show this.

From link [2]: "SARS-CoV-2 (the novel coronavirus that causes coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19)"

The previous comment was just making the point that the (new) virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the associated disease is called COVID-19.

Excuse the incivility, but no.

COVID-19: disease caused by SARS-CoV-2

SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

SARS-CoV: severe accute respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Coronavirus: virus that causes respiratory diseases in mammals, such as SARS (SARS-CoV) MERS (MERS-CoV), and COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)

>SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

Excuse the incivility, but no. SARS-CoV-2 is not a strain or type of SARS-CoV. The viruses share ancestors, but SARS-CoV-2 did not come directly from SARS-CoV. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are in the category of beta coronaviruses[0].

"The whole genome-based phylogenetic analysis presented that two Bat SARS-like CoVs (ZXC21 and ZC45) were the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2."[1]

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/9/3/240/htm

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/pathogens/pathogens-09-00240/article_de...

Excuse the incivility once again, but no.

While we're on the topic of linguistic pedantary, strain isn't exclusive to direct mutations from a parent genome. Strains, like much of biological taxonomy, are a human abstraction to make communication of the idea of -- in this case -- "a virus sharing similar properties to coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome" -- albeit this is a very simplified definition for the sake of brevity.

SARS is caused by SARS-CoV-1 and COVID-19 is caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Rather, if we would like to be absolutely correct about these classifications, we would say SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are both strains of SARSr-CoV (Severe accute respiratory syndrome related coronavirus), which in itself is a species, an abstract concept used to group related organisms into a convenient umbrella term.

There is no "eukaryote" organism the same way there is no "SARSr-CoV" organism. The added "r" was a recent addition when COVID-19 was discovered.

I will cede that I didn't specify this last point, and you were correct to point it out.

Wow. A civil exchange on proper use of terms by two disparate but related technological domain experts. It’ll go on forever.

>we would say SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 are both strains of SARSr-CoV

Thank you for making my point, again.

I don't believe I did.

Genera -- as in SARS-CoV-2's genus is Betacoronovirus -- don't have "strains."

Only families -- such as the SARSr-CoV family -- have strains.

To GP's point, your initial reply said:

> SARS-CoV-2: strain of SARS-CoV

GP was pointing out that this was incorrect, and you just made that point by stating it yourself.

Assuming you are intending to engage in the conversation and not be a pedant, I might let you know that your replies are coming across quite coarsely. More specifically, as to prefaces on earlier comments, there is no need to excuse incivility, because there is no need for incivility here.

I found the exchange to be more than civil, with pleasantries not being taken in the literal sense.

At least this did not fall into the category of "Cold regurgitation of data" (quite popular it seems) and had a level of warmth that was an indication of passion, more than anger (from all parties).

If they added a temperature social cue to HN comments..... That would be funny.

I'll add that the family of viruses is called Corona virus because they are 'crown shaped'

Kind of strange that the name of the virus contains the symptoms of the disease (SARS = severe accute respiratory syndrome) while the disease doesn't.

You can just search for 'Coronaviridae' instead. The overwhelming majority of people searching for coronavirus want pandemic news.

"Is there a search engine which excludes the world's biggest websites?"

There was "rebranded" web search that someone created a number of years ago and posted on HN that aimed to exclude the top websites from results. I cannot remember the name he gave to the project.

One way to exclude the world's biggest websites when using Google is to restrict the search to TLDs other than .com, .net and .org. The root zone is full of silly new TLDs that no one uses for large websites. There are hundreds to choose from.

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus+site:edu

Looks like Google Scholar is including a number of "coronavirus links" on the main page but thankfully not in the results.

https://scholar.google.com

https://scholar.google.com/search?q=coronavirus

Why not skip Google and "web search" and use a database that does not include all the crap one finds on the www

Something like

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov?term=coronavirus

or

https://search.crossref.org/?q=coronavirus

In that case, I would omit webpages from the past year.

Try http://biomed-sanity.com/ .

Why would Google showcase non official sources?

It is kind of funny that we talk about SARS-COV-2 as if it is the only coronavirus. Coronavirus, singular. If I’m not mistaken the common cold is in the corona virus family.

The common cold is caused by coronaviruses and rhinoviruses. The skew is heavily towards rhinoviruses.

Rhinovirus, that’s right. Thanks. I saw an article recently about colds caused by coronaviruses so it was fresh in my head.

If you are looking for a forum search, check out https://boardreader.com/.

I have a theory that web crawling alone is not the best way forward to find the most relevant results because of the volume of content continually being created, much of which is niche and sometimes dynamic.

Instead I believe linking together vertical search sources that have targeted information based on search intent will provide better results.

I created Runnaroo [0] for that purpose. If you search a programing question, it will pull traditional organic results from Google, but it will also directly query Stack Overflow for a deeper search.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com

This is really good!

https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=J+apply+verb

versus google's completely useless:

https://www.google.com/search?safe=active&q=J+apply+verb&oq=...

Everyone else, get in here: this is top notch stuff.

This is somewhat ironic because 20 years ago, hobbyists would frequently put their obscure personal pages on Geocities and other large corporation's web space.

Memory can be foggy but the most useful were hosted on university pages or random folders off a random domains or you get a subdomain. I picked the username 'search' which gave me search.batcave.net which worked great until one day they just took over the subdomain for a site wide search. They were confused when I complained.

Sure people hosted on geocities and tripod and they were the biggest and easiest to remember. But quality of a geocities page compared to a mit student page was much lower.

20 years ago, it was extremely common for your ISP to give you 5MB or whatever of space to use. users.ispname.com/~yourname or whatever. It was great, tbh, since anyone with cuteftp and notepad could publish to the world.

Still common now, at least in Australia. My ISP gives me 1GB if hosting for a website and 10 mailboxes.

Hey! I actually liked this idea and I'm considering starting a learning project on it. I've seen a lot of interest and ideas in the comments, and decided to create a very short Google form to start gathering all the interested people so we can organise something interesing. Is anybody in? :)

https://forms.gle/5KuTYVdYaMzRD2n78

If there was a way to simply exclude from searches: shopping, news, images, videos, and “listicles”, I think that would get us most of the way.

Especially shopping. The endless stores are the worst part of search results. If I search for anything that remotely looks like a product, the results are just choked with store after store trying to sell me the thing. Awful.

If you do your own search engine like that, implementing rules that block affiliated commerce blogs from appearing would help alot.