Recently I put something together in Common Lisp, a language I’m a novice at, so I often had to search. The first result returned in all my Google searches was a copycat website. Someone had clearly taken some previous high-quality Lisp reference and extensively rewritten it to avoid copyright violation, then loaded it with SEO. However, their English was rather poor and so this rewrite was a pain to read.
I would love a search engine that would allow me to zap certain domains and hide them permanently from results, but at the same time without retaining information about me for advertising purposes.
Exactly. I wonder how a person could construct a highly curated google search. Not just blocking of sites but also a bit of parsing on the site for disposal purposes. Could it all be done on a local machine?
On a related note, as eBay became more of an all-purpose webstore I'll tend to use it rather than Amazon search to find products. The actual purchase, if it happens, is wherever.
You'd lose all the long-tail quality stuff (e.g. my own write-only blog :P ), but also all the garbage. It might be worth it.
I don't think you could kill Google with that, but it might make a viable lifestyle business.
Edit: and I meant to add - I was looking for info on a specific Synology device the other day. Google turned up Synology's own website (good) and a zillion crappy affiliate-link-spam sites. eBay and Reddit were the best sources of info when I sighed and started constraining the search with site: prefixes.
I know basically nothing of the mechanics of search, although I expect that a boutique search engine would have trouble accessing the guts of third party sites as they don't want to get hammered by the world.
I did just think of an interesting specialty engine. If you had fast access to the full library on libgen or sci-hub, a person could produce a pretty interesting set of abilities.
My impression is that if you're not dealing with people trying to game the algorithm then it's all a lot simpler.
As to data sources - with a constrained set of sites the creation of custom adapters should be do-able I'd have thought.
Not that I have any plans. Maybe I should though :)
Edit: come to think of it, it's practically an internet law that stuff you think of already exists. So maybe I should just post an Ask HN for the link to the search engine in question...
(I have similar thoughts about diacussion fora fwiw)
Ask HN posts are supposed to end with a question mark
It used to be that a challenger would get no traction because why would one bother when Google always popped out good answers to searches. Now... I'd at least try something new to skip all the makeuseof, wikihow, and similar dross without having to explicitly constrain it to reddit.
So no, it's not dying. But this is how it could die.