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

Re:A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes... by Siira on Friday September 17, 2021 @11:24AM (#28566556)

I tried some queries for Harry Potter fanfictions, and the results were pretty much completely unrelated. There weren’t that many results, either.

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Re:A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes... by marginalia_nu on Saturday September 18, 2021 @03:30PM (#28578597)

I'm curious what you searched for.

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=harry+potter+fanfi...

This seems to return a pretty decent number of sites relating to that (as well as some sites not relating to that).

The search engine isn't always great at knowing what a page is about, unfortunately.

This seemed to return mostly relevant results

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%22harry+potter%22...

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Re:A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes... by Siira on Sunday September 19, 2021 @07:05PM (#28588786)

Yes, shorter queries return more relevant results. I think this was the first query that came to my mind:

https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=Best+%22harry+pott...

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Re:A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes... by marginalia_nu on Monday September 20, 2021 @03:28AM (#28591124)

Yeah, that's just not a type of query my search engine is particularly good at. It's pretty dumb, and just tries to match as much of the webpage against the query as it can.

This used to be how all search engines worked, but I guess people have been taught by google that they should ask questions now, instead of search for terms.

I wonder how I can guide people to make more suitable queries. Maybe I should just make it look less like google.

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