News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A search engine built by the crowd by mcintyre1994 on Thursday July 11, 2013 @12:31PM (#6027102)
Hmm, this is an interesting algorithm, but I'd challenge its major assumption for a lot of searches. I don't have metrics, so of course my own assumptions can be challenged also, feel free to.

I think that a lot of search engine enquiries are essentially questions, with an answer that can be considered correct. Absolutely not all, but I think enough that they should certainly be considered. In that case, a site which immediately and clearly answers the question should be given, I want my answer within seconds, not minutes. If you give me the site that answers my question and that users spend the most time on, that's the exact opposite of what I want in this case.

Here's an example, I search "Population of America", your site's top result is sporcle.com, a quiz site. I bet people spend ages on there guessing the population of various countries etc, but I'd prefer to just get my answer.

That said, it appears such queries are handled outside the main algorithm by your competitors. Both Google and DuckDuckGo will give a card, at the top of the result, answering my query - I don't even have to visit a website.

I guess the tl;dr is that it's awesome that this is ambitious, but I challenge the assumption your algorithm is desirable for the majority of search results. Neither is Google's really though, so maybe this is an overly harsh criticism of something Google probably did very poorly early on too.

Re:A search engine built by the crowd by geraldbaeck on Thursday July 11, 2013 @12:36PM (#6027135)
I think you guesses are absolutely right. We never intended to compete against other engines in the field of "Answers". I think you will always get a better result for ""Population of America" if you search for ai at DuckDuckGo or Google. But in the other hand if you search for example for "NSA" on Blippex (https://www.blippex.org/?q=NSA), we are assuming that you will get those articles about the NSA which is currently the most interesting or the most read.

-Gerald Disclosure: I am the CTO of archify/Blippex.

Re:A search engine built by the crowd by mcintyre1994 on Thursday July 11, 2013 @12:53PM (#6027279)
That's fair enough, it seems like it would be really useful for article searching, like the NSA one you gave (great, example, blew Google out the water!). I can see it being great for research too, assuming academics spend the most time on a good source which seems reasonable. I'll definitely be giving this a go for some searches, really nice!

Oh, and a quick suggestion: Have you considered a Firefox search engine addon? I do most searches from the omnibar, and I think more people would switch search engine up there than manually go via blippex.com

Re:A search engine built by the crowd by geraldbaeck on Thursday July 11, 2013 @01:04PM (#6027363)
Thanks. Yes we will implement a Firefox search engine addon soon.