Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

by taxonomyman • 14 years ago

552 195 14 years ago

Turns out removing the top million results from a search for Google... still returns google. Or google.com.au to be precise.

It's a cool idea, but I'm not sure it's working. I tried "american history" but it wouldn't return anything at all if I changed the "Remove the Top" dropdown.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Good feedback. Right now the filtering is not 100% working for non .com, .net, .org, .co.uk domains. Still working on it.

cleverjake• 14 years ago

very interesting hack. thanks for doing it

tocomment2• 14 years ago

I think remove results with my search term in the domain name and this would be perfect!

For example I searched for how to start a garden and I can guarantee that startagarden.com is junk. But indie see some useful advice from small blogs etc

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

How would you like to see this work?

tocomment2• 14 years ago

Well for example I searched for "grow a vegetable garden" and I still see a lot of results from URL's like:

http://howtogrowavegetablegarden.net/ http://www.grow-your-own-vegetable-garden.com/

And I just know any domain name optimized for a certain search term is going to be garbage.

I guess a simple version of this feature is you'd have a setting: "Exclude domains that contain my search term".

When the user clicks that you'd compare the domain name (removing all special characters) with my search term (also removing all special characters and white space). Maybe compare via edit distance and exclude if it passes a threshold?

Although edit distance might not work too well, perhaps looking at the longest common substring and if it's > say 90% of the length of my query exclude it?

I guess it would take some playing around. But there should be a good algorithm to exclude domain names very similar to my query.

rogerbinns• 14 years ago

It doesn't appear to work. I did a search for aspirin and the top match returned by this is #5 doing the same search with Google.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

We're simply removing the top million (or what you select) sites. The results can be the same - it just means that that site isn't in the list of top one million sites on the web.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Top million sites, not top million results.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Correct. Top million sites.

RegEx4• 14 years ago

I like this idea a lot. I came across a nice, concise explanation of a Buffer overflow

http://www.apolis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=...

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

That's awesome. Maybe we're on to something..

pash• 14 years ago

This is a copy of the Wikipedia article on buffer overflows.

RegEx4• 14 years ago

Damnit, you're right.

romaniv3• 14 years ago

One of the addition I would make to this search engine is to delete all the Wikipedia clones from the results.

hoprocker2• 14 years ago

Looks like this idea isn't totally in the free-and-clear from content farms.

duck• 14 years ago

Great idea, although I think if you could explain it a bit better you could avoid the confusion like several of these comments are showing. I like how my Hacker Newsletter project shows up #2 when searching for Hacker News. :)

zenpaul• 14 years ago

And how do you determine the "top" million sites?

dahumpty• 14 years ago

Check out:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Cushman• 14 years ago

I'd be fascinated to see the kind of SEO that would go on if this took off.

"Bad news-- we're a top 100 hit for several of our main keywords. We'll have to change our URL scheme again."

ssharp• 14 years ago

High page rank pages / sites could start holding competitors' pages hostage by linking to them.

Maybe we'd see a resurgence in Flash.

jpk• 14 years ago

So what we're saying is: "This would be a terrible, terrible thing for the web."

arb99• 14 years ago

whats flash got to do with anything?

search engines can follow links (sometimes) through flash. and search engines know what the most popular sites are even without counting number of links to sites, so hiding links through flash (or js, whatever) wouldn't help

Bud• 14 years ago

We can call it Search Engine Pessimization!

knewter• 14 years ago

clap........................clap

hoprocker2• 14 years ago

Bravo!

chrislomax• 14 years ago

Only a little thing, could do with maintaining query strings between pages. It lost my query string and returned no results when I changed the drop down without me noticing.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Good catch. Will fix. Thx

bo1024• 14 years ago

I'd really like to see randomization instead. Return results picked randomly from within the top 10 million or something.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Randomization is a good idea. Give everyone a fair change kind of thing maybe? reply

jQueryIsAwesome• 14 years ago

I need predictability... but make it optional, maybe a check-box with a key shortcut (the `R` I suggest).

shazow• 14 years ago

I'm not sure this is a great idea. Predictability is a staple of a good user experience. Getting different results for the same query between users or sessions is bound to lead to broken expectations and frustration.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Think of this as more of a discovery engine. And predictability takes the fun out of discovery.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

I like the idea of offering it after the first search. I see the value of this kind of search engine as introducing some novelty/entropy into the system. I could imagine using it as a backup to primary search engines, in which case I'd definitely want to get some randomness going.

I wouldn't just want the "million-and-eleventh" site (so to speak) when clicking next.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

Would be cool in mobile devices to see a shake gesture to "shake up" the results.

You could use this on modern smartphone browsers: https://github.com/alexgibson/shake.js

waivej• 14 years ago

Wow... It felt like using Google 10 years ago. I think you are onto something.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Wow.. awesome comliment..

mburshteyn• 14 years ago

Usually don't search unless I'm looking for something in particular, but just played with this for a good 15 minutes running random queries. The results are really good and at the same time I'm discovering sites I'd never otherwise see with Google.

felixchan• 14 years ago

How did you build this? Are you indexing the entire web yourself? Or are you using Google's index/removing the top 1 million based on domain?

wildmXranat• 14 years ago

I think search APIs like Yahoo BOSS allow you pass arguments that contain a black list of domains. I think it's the 'sites' argument that may be used like this: &sites=-google.com

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

You are right, but they won't allow the list to be 1 million sites long. You are talking 15 megs of data per data in plain text per request.

But I like the idea of being able for users to, via a setting perhaps, add their own list of deny/include sites.

Thx for the comment.

wonderwhy• 14 years ago

What is the ranking used for the top million sites? A search result for "Australia" returns as the top result http://australia.gov.au, which Alexa ranks as 20,615 globally. Actually, a lot of the queries I tried returned Australian sites.

http://millionshort.com/search.php?q=australia&remove=10...

http://millionshort.com/search.php?q=somalia&remove=1000... -- another Australian site.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Right now the filtering is not 100% working for non .com, .net, .org, .co.uk domains. So, .gov.au isn't being properly filtered yet. Soon.

slyall• 14 years ago

The Public Suffix list http://publicsuffix.org/ maintains a list of domains you need to filter on.

selectout2• 14 years ago

Not sure if I found an anomaly or what, but a simple search of "Privacy" returns results from thesaurus.com, merriam-webster.com, truste.com, kelloggcompany.com, and many more that are all in the top few thousand according to QuantCast and Compete.

Great idea though, will definitely try this out some more.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

merriam-webster.com redirects to m-w.com - looking into the others.. Sometimes if a site has header redirects it gets lost in the filters. Thx for pointing this out.

selectout2• 14 years ago

ahh that explains it. I'm actually working on a personal project right now and this could help out quite a bit, so I am excited to see where this goes. Best of luck!

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

Would you share some implementation details.

What's your source for the top million sites; where do you get your site list from for the other results?

tnorthcutt• 14 years ago

And of course, W3Schools still manages to show up, thanks to their multiple crazy subdomains: http://cl.ly/GFup

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Your're right. We strip www from the domains. We need a better function to rip out the domain from a URL. Just haven't had time to cook one up yet.

mattj• 14 years ago

Try out http://publicsuffix.org/ - that plus a custom suffix list of overrides works wonders!

EvilTerran• 14 years ago

"httpwww."? Seriously?

What the hell is their problem?

carlosaguayo• 14 years ago

If you search for "google" and remove the top million results, you still get google main page (in this case, the one for australia and india...)

g_lined• 14 years ago

This is a great idea and I see myself coming back to this. It's a shame that a little blog on tumblr or blogspot gets taken out because it's under a big name domain - but this has spam related benefits too.

Great work!

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Maybe we can set up a Webmaster tools sort of submission process for inclusion.

eliasmacpherson• 14 years ago

This is a breath of fresh air - I'm loving the unpredictability of the top results! It's like flicking through a new set of 1000 tv channels in a different country.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

The positive feedback is awesome.. Thx

yayadarsh• 14 years ago

After a few test searches, this is surprisingly effective for things which I had resigned "un-findable" because of poor Google results. This is most apparent on non-technical things, in this case specific Jazz chord fingerings for a guitar class I am taking.

I am very interested as to what comes of this, or rather what is influenced by its implications.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

That was exactly the goal. In our opinion the "un-findable" as you put it represents a gold mine of information yet to be absorbed and enjoyed.

cjlars• 14 years ago

Guitar chords / tabs / lessons are a terrible SEO spam offender... Look at that! I finally found an accurate transcription of "Bohemian Rhapsody"

__alexs2• 14 years ago

Well that's one way to break out of the filter-bubble/echo-chamber I suppose. If only our best search technology was based on something better than a popularity contest :(

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Popularity I think is important. But not at the expense of relevance. It's not a easy nut to crack.

romaniv3• 14 years ago

Why? If I search, say, for a game review, I don't care whether it comes from a popular website or a blog no one reads. In fact, the topmost websites are more likely to be biased, since they try to appease everyone and they also have strong relationships with publishers. The blog no one reads is nearly guaranteed to be honest (if not well-written).

This holds true for most topics I can think of. Moreover, if I ever need to read Wikipedia and such, I already know about those websites, and I can go there directly - no need to search. Shouldn't web search engines act like discovery tools?

mserdarsanli• 14 years ago

Wow that is pretty awesome. I reached some results I want that I could not find via popular search engines with hours of searching. Believe it or not, this engine is changing my life.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Glad that code is being put to good.

swalsh• 14 years ago

The results are surprisingly good. I did some searches for recipes, and frankly without the top 1000 you really start getting some fresh hits. Entries by real people, rather than sites raking up recipes for a hit.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

We're surprising ourselves too.

shawnc• 14 years ago

First thing i used it for was recipes too! Started to find little blogs, or sites outside of north america, with some great Vegetarian recipes.

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

Wow, I didn't know until today that Google doesn't serve more than the top 1000 hits. (A result of me thinking, "can't I just ask Google to show me the million-first through the million-tenth hits?)

digitallimit• 14 years ago

I searched for "Hero Academy" and the first result was Google's 5th result, a site called Hero Academy with the url "hero-academy.com". That's not very "million short", IMHO.

abrichr• 14 years ago

The site removes the top million sites by popularity, not the first million results returned by a Google search. "hero-academy.com" is likely not in the top million most popular sites.

mathetic• 14 years ago

If this becomes popular, at some point results would disappear since unpopular sites will be pushed into the first million.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

I guess the thought would that graduated to some level of critical mass. Sort of like a kickstart program for sites.

mayneack2• 14 years ago

At some point, you wouldn't even be able to search for millionshort.

zeratul• 14 years ago

It means that our ranking algorithms have good recall but very poor precision. We value web page connectivity more than its content. We don't know how to teach machines to evaluate web page for its merit so we hope that a large number of Twitting, Liking and Plusing non-experts will approximate single expert. Millionshort shows that this model isn't good enough.

RegEx4• 14 years ago

I was able to rank for some moderately competitive terms just by paying someone minimum wage to go leave nice comments on dofollow blogs. The whole "Content is king" meme is a joke, really.

rudiger• 14 years ago

Interesting. How do you find blogs that don't implement nofollow?

_delirium• 14 years ago

We value web page connectivity more than its content.

That's pretty much precisely how PageRank (in its original form) changed web search. At the time, at least, it worked because we were really bad at automatically analyzing content, and the connectivity signal provided better results.

brudgers3• 14 years ago

It shows the problem with using tags <or metadata> for ranking rather than considering the source of the information.

Yahoo became the goto portal because the quality of their links was high. Google overtook them because metadata was the only practical way to keep up with the pace at which the web was expanding.

However, after more than a decade of SEO, it's limitations are evident as the long tail gets increasingly harder to reach with search engines based on the Google model, e.g. "Purchase empiricist philosophers on eBay."

My suspicion is that Google is abandoning neutral search for personalized search in part because of the problems SEO represents when it comes to neutral searching and personal tracking provides an algorithmic way of establishing the quality of results for ranking purposes. One which is easier than attempting to develop a neutral curation algorithm.

pfarrell2• 14 years ago

I would prefer if my previous search was populated in the search box after completing a search (since I might want to try the search with a different filter).

It appears you have an "off by one issue" in the sidebar. There's always a blank entry in the list of ignored sites.

Filtering does not seem to be working (or I don't understand it). Searching on "chicken" produced the same results with 1million or 100k removed.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Will add that feature. Thx

pfarrell2• 14 years ago

I neglected to mention... Awesome idea!

fibbery• 14 years ago

Doesn't make a dent in the travel site spam, unfortunately. though I might use this just to permanently remove About.com...

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

A few of the suggestions included the ability to set include/exclude sites which I think we'll add.

martinaglv• 14 years ago

Is it safe to assume that this is how Google's search results would look if nobody did SEO?

MichaelApproved2• 14 years ago

I don't think so. Consider Facebook. They should show up when doing a search for social media or related term but with this SE, they don't show up at all for any search.

SquareWheel• 14 years ago

No, not at all. Google is driven by many signals that SEOs try to optimize on, but the methodology is still the same. Top-ranking sites have high-quality sites linking to them, good content, and are supposed to not look spammy (though that's debatable).

I don't know how this engine ranks but I assume it's a similar system, they're just chopping a good portion of the results out. For what you said to be true, the top 10K/100K/1M rankings would have to be there entirely due to intervention from an SEO, and that's just not the case. The Wikipedia's of the world have enough going for them that they don't need SEO, so they'll always show up in Google, and never in this engine.

wazoox• 14 years ago

A real serendipity engine. Absolutely great, thank you. I'm finding tons of interesting products and ideas by searching the most banal things :)

erichocean2• 14 years ago

Man, I love this thing. I've already found a bunch of interesting links on path tracing. Bookmark'd.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Sweet. Glad to have helped.

dclowd9901• 14 years ago

Is it just me, or are the results fairly congruent with standard results from a search engine?

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

They are to a degree. We just remove remove the top million most popular sites. So, searching for "social network" would normally yield Facebook.com, but with MillionShort you discover a social network that that didn't make it past the noise.

hafabnew• 14 years ago

Searching for 'python global interpreter lock' yields some interest blog articles describing the problems, also some related articles about approaches to the C10k problem with python (preforking, worker processes, etc.)

A++ would search again.

jtchang• 14 years ago

Wow some of the content there is great. Forget about searching the deep web. For me deep is the real gems buried under the first 100 or so results where stuff actually gets interesting!

pazimzadeh• 14 years ago

Removing Wikipedia might be a mistake. Otherwise, it's great.

brudgers3• 14 years ago

Links to Wikipedia could appear in a separate box near the top...it should be this way on Google and Bing as well...because Wikipedia is either exactly what someone wants or exactly what they don't want.

romaniv3• 14 years ago

Why would anyone want Wikipedia in search results is beyond me. If I want to read a Wikipedia article, I can just search Wikipedia itself. I know the kind of information it has, so there is no point in "ranking" it against other websites.

tom9729• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this is still the case, but in the past Wikipedia's search engine was terrible and it was actually easier to google "X wikipedia" or "X wiki".

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

This is the first off-brand search engine I've seen that's, in some sense, cooler than Google.

For one thing, the huge miasma of spam websites that dominates the SERPs just isn't there -- I hope this lights a fire under Google's butt and people see another world is possible.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Thanks for the great comparison.

jaems33• 14 years ago

It reminds me of why I first moved to Google from Yahoo/Webcrawler/Altavista/etc in the first place.

erichocean2• 14 years ago

Yup. Since this is trivial for Google to copy, it's unlikely that it'll actually disrupt Google in any way, but still...very cool.

radley• 14 years ago

Please add a favicon so I can see in my (icon only) Bookmarks Toolbar.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

favicon coming right up. Minutes away.

libraryatnight• 14 years ago

This reminds of searching the internet in the 90's, I'm finding results from pages I haven't visited or heard of before now.

This is really refreshing.

bstar772• 14 years ago

There's one pretty big flaw with this approach... For certain searches that do not have "millions of results", you get completely unrelated results.

If I search my name then the results are for names similar to mine, but not actually my name. This makes it completely useless for searching my name. I would think that there are many searches with this problem.

I think there needs to be some kind of weighting system used that dynamically decides the cutoff point. One million is a huge over-generalization for all search terms.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

The number of results aren't a factor. We are removing results from sites that are in the list of top 1 million most popular web sites. Hope that helps.

bstar772• 14 years ago

Ah, this seems to be the case. It looks like you are dropping my name down to "thousand from results" despite it still saying "million from results".

Very nice!

heydonovan• 14 years ago

I'm really liking this. Instead of being bombarded with content that's just blasted with keywords, I get relevant well-written articles. Not only that, but no more W3Schools in my SERP's. The chance to read an article that's written with humans in mind, instead of Google is more than enough reason to spend some more time using this.

nostromo• 14 years ago

It's interesting to see popularity used as an inverse corollary with quality. Imagine a TV that skipped the most popular programming (goodbye American Idol), or a radio station that only plays non-hits.

Of course, there are great websites out there that are very popular (Wikipedia, NYTimes/WSJ, StackOverflow). I'd love to see a search engine with a better signal for quality than non-popularity (this search engine), or SEO (Google), but it's a fun start. :)

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Maybe think of Million Short as more of a discovery engine. We're not saying a quality site can't be popular.

copper• 14 years ago

I think Fravia+ would have actually liked what you have here - its a really nice search engine.

mayneack2• 14 years ago

Should be popular with hipsters.

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

Not any more - I've heard of it.

thebigshane• 14 years ago

I think you're probably right, but do you mean that as a "dig" against millionshort? You may be entering meta-meta-contrarianism: the hipster of hipsters. :)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...

afhof• 14 years ago

You have to be careful with that idea since it can still lead to poor quality. My campus's radio station (WREK Atlanta) seems to play just weird music for the sake of being weird. They never play popular music, but they rarely play any good music either.

PBxdId7wFr• 14 years ago

Or you may have different tastes from the DJs.

evoxed• 14 years ago

I listen to WREK from Japan via iTunes Radio– in fact WREK, WUSC, and KCRW are the only reason I have to still listen to radio. I can understand not liking it though, I was pretty surprised the first time I was on campus and heard music I liked.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

WREK is just about the best radio there is. It's not weird for the sake of being weird. It's intentionally eclectic and far-reaching, sure, but the point is to broaden horizons. As much for the DJs themselves to broaden their horizons as the audience.

Disclaimer- former WREK DJ. :-)

btopham• 14 years ago

Try GSU's 88.5 WRAS. They tend to stay away from both popular artists and the really strange stuff.

sciurus• 14 years ago

The University of Georgia's student station has a pretty strict music philosophy that excludes popular artists. I would disagree that it results in no good music being played.

"Artists who meet any of the following criteria are automatically disqualified from airplay on WUOG 90.5FM:

The artist is or has been in regular rotation on major commercial radio stations. This does not apply to material used in specialty shows on major commercial stations.

The artist has a music video that has aired on major music video stations. This does not apply to material used in specialty shows on major commercial networks.

Another criterion that DJs must use when selecting music for airplay is its position on the Billboard Album Charts. If one of the artist’s albums has entered the top 50, then a DJ cannot play that artist."

http://wuog.org/music/philosophy/

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

Youtube, grooveshark and others kind of fill that gap. They still promote popular content though, but that's unavoidable unless you take money out of the equation.

http://channel101.com/ offers a nice selection of "unpopular" shows. You should check Danny Jelinek's "Everything" (https://vimeo.com/channels/231109) if you're into video-art.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

That's an awesome idea. You guys should add a button to Google search results that would completely invert the result list, and show the lowest stuff first, highest stuff last. Almost like sorting a list of products by price.

Anything you can identify as pure SEO spam, exclude of course. But if it's some original content that just isn't well connected or whatever, include it.

Then just observe user behavior for a while until you can discern patterns in how people who play around with that use it to discover new and interesting stuff. Maybe a new algorithm might come of it.

NLips• 14 years ago

Reversing Google's results is an awful idea as you'd get the worst possible results for a search i.e. those that are completely unrelated to the search terms.

You need to either remove the top 100 (or 1000 etc) and look at what remains, or reverse only the top 10000 results (or 1000 etc).

meatsock• 14 years ago

i've had great success playing the non-hits format on college radio for years now, theres always great interest in what hasnt bubbled to the surface by force of popularity.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

I think that quality and page rank are not correlated. You may well have some quality sitting anywhere between page 1 and a million. Page rank is driven by various things like freshness and keyword matching. How do you determine quality?

This website is an interesting experiment however if you're after discovering random semi related pages, why not just use google or stumble upon?

Is there a way to include domains automatically excluded? For example WordPress.com is excluded.

serbrech• 14 years ago

The results feel actually fresh. It's removing the consumerism layer of bullshit that google serves us everyday. Also wondering if that has something to do with the "bubble" that google creates around us based on our search history and social network information.

Thanks for that.

83457• 14 years ago

Just re-found a site I was looking for but couldn't find with google the other day. This could definitely be helpful.

hsparikh• 14 years ago

As someone learning web development, I'd love to get some insights into how one could build this.

lubujackson2• 14 years ago

Not knowing anything about what they do, the hack-ish way you could do it is to use Google CSE (custom search engines) to add a list of negative domains. Where to get the list of top 1 million domains? Probably from Quantcast here: http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1

scoot• 14 years ago

It's amusing to see all the SEO "experts" that don't make it into the top million:

http://millionshort.com/search.php?q=seo&remove=1000k

Alexandervn• 14 years ago

It removes the top million in general, not per query.

grampajoe• 14 years ago

The site's way too wide on my netbook, 1024x600. Also, the list of domains removed from the results covers up part of the results themselves.

bane2• 14 years ago

It's a similar measure that's often used in NLP. Sentences, documents etc. are usually stripped of common or popular terms first and the remaining ones tend to have higher information value.

It's not entirely a surprise that it works for meta-language constructs like the web and site popularity.

robrenaud• 14 years ago

Uhh,

1) I am basically certain that it doesn't work. Imagine something this simple actually did work in general. Do you think Google, Bing, etc, wouldn't have implemented it?

2) I think the analogy is extremely flawed. nytimes.com is by no means a web page equivalent to "the" or "a" in language. Articles, pronouns, etc, don't really carry meaning. Despite being popular, nytimes certainly does.

bane2• 14 years ago

I don't know. I haven't really spent a lot of time looking at this to get a good feel of the quality. But consider this, NYT tends to be a secondary source: e.g. book reviews (books are the primary source), science news (scientific papers are primary), business news (market movements and press releases are primary), etc.

Now consider, if I'm interested in some particular thing in science, is it better to get the NYT science reporting or just get the professor's publication and research page on their university website? Filtering out the top-n sites is more likely to turn up the professor's site near the top of the pile rather than after all of the popular sites' second and third level reporting.

Is this better? Depends on the audience. A "popular science" goal would argue the former is the better as science news simplifies, abstracts and popularizes complex science (with varying degrees of quality) while a scientist would prefer the latter.

charlieok• 14 years ago

It's like a hipster search engine. It's only interested in things before those things are cool.

cnbeuiwx• 14 years ago

Thank you - very refreshing! DuckDuckGo should implement something like this just for the spirit of it.

The web just got more interesting. :)

zecho• 14 years ago

> Imagine a search engine that simply removed the top 1 million most popular web sites from its index. What would you discover?

A lot of my competitors who are still on the first page of Google results.

pessimizer• 14 years ago

This is pretty amazing. I didn't know that the old internet was still there! This may become my new favorite search engine.

pjin• 14 years ago

Funny, on my first query I found an obscure HN scraper:

  http://tazod.com/

dools• 14 years ago

Wow I think this is the exact idea I had for "HN Time Machine" - basically a thing to extend the life of the newest page and speed up the movement of stuff through the home page (ie. I think the HN new page moves too quickly and the home page not quickly enough)

it• 14 years ago

I really like this. Right away I found some new sites about that I hadn't seen before with interesting content.

brudgers3• 14 years ago

I would like to see the search engine adhere more strictly to quoted search terms. It seems that they are partially ignored, which gives it some of the same problems that the major engines have.

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

8 hours later, we just launched our first re-design. Thanks for all the great feedback and support. More to come.

qwertyz• 14 years ago

Now if I could add it to firefox's search bar...

johnpowell• 14 years ago

I came here to make the same request.

And I am loving this.

hybrid11• 14 years ago

This is a cool search engine for discovery, but it defeats the purpose when you are looking for a location. Do a search for "facebook", you will not get any result that links you to facebook.com .

kevinrpope• 14 years ago

I've seen people do this a few times, and don't understand why they do it (Google 'facebook' or 'twitter' and then click the link to get to the site instead of typing 'facebook.com' or 'twitter.com' into the address bar). Can you explain why? I'm truly curious.

djeikyb2• 14 years ago

Couple reasons I've encountered..

1. User doesn't understand the WWW. They believe Google is THE gateway to everything internet.

2. User doesn't know (or has trouble typing) the exact address. Google tends to have the authoritative result first for popular sites like facebook, amazon, twitter..

wyck• 14 years ago

This is an incredible breath of fresh air, what an odd thing to say.

tomelders• 14 years ago

Should I be depressed that I'm the top hit for my own name?

garraeth• 14 years ago

I love this! And am totally going to use it. Removing the top "thousand sites" removes pretty much all the sites I WISH I could have filtered from my Google results anyhow (ehow, w3schools, etc).

One request: please keep the search text in the form field after clicking "search". Just so users can search the same thing multiple times with different values in the "Remove the top" drop-down.

thorin_2• 14 years ago

Very interesting. I was pleased with the results and have already added this site to my Chrome bookmark bar, right between my Google search and Hacker News icons.

Ben_Burke• 14 years ago

i searched for my site and in teh goog i get first page....here i found nothing....so for me this = no good. I understand the base but i dont understand the result

halle_lu_jah3• 14 years ago

Here's what Dropbox thinks about power users:

WSJ: What's next?

Mr. Ferdowsi: We continue to focus on actually solving problems that real people have and not being distracted by what power users want.

Google has made clear what they think about power users:

No + operators in search.

No web-based code search.

No Google Labs for the public.

etc.

Plenty of wood behind the Google arrows, but all the cool ones have been cast out of the quiver.

Just what kind of targets is Google aiming at nowadays?

Millionshort I give you +999,999.

I would give you +1M if you took out the AdSense and PlusOne javascript.

This has been a long time coming.

Alas, DDG and other alternatives are all about _money_.

Search is about _discovery_.

doktrin• 14 years ago

I'm getting odd results with the following query :

Search String : Ruby

Remove From Top : 1000 & 10000

In both instances, the top hit is http://www.ruby-lang.org, which is also the top hit from both Google and DDG.

Am I missing something?

edit: formatting

prawn• 14 years ago

I think that removes the top 1,000 or 10,000 across all searches, not just "ruby".

Tossrock• 14 years ago

Well, in a rather meta turn of events, searching for my username on this returned a link to hackerbra.in, which appears to be some kind of HN mirror.

halle_lu_jah3• 14 years ago

You think that top results in Google and other commercial search engines are always ranked based on "popularity"?

It would be harsh to call this naive, but it shows a serious lack of SEM and SEO knowledge. Ever heard of "paid placement"?

Many years ago when Digital's AltaVista was our main search engine, it was becoming loaded down with paid placement.

The results were polluted.

Google eventually became the "clean" solution.

But now it's Google that is loaded down with all sorts of commercial crud, much of pointing to Google acquisitions.

And paid placement, among numerous other strategies, new and old, still exists.

The simplicity of millionshort is brilliant.

Filter out the crap.

twelvechairs• 14 years ago

Thankyou! I can see this being something I regularly use.

It may be a simple idea, but its something nobody else has done before, and I think the creators deserve a lot of credit for coming up with and implementing it. I hope they manage to get something from it. I can see that if the site becomes popular it will just get copied by other search sites.

halle_lu_jah3• 14 years ago

"Quality" is subjective.

More relevant is _accuracy_, i.e., you get what you specify via search operators, and results are not influenced by all of Google's silly "factors". You know what you're looking for and how to frame the query. But Google assumes you're dumb and thinks it should decide for you.

Alexa Top 1M is a nice filter because the data comes from the Alexa Toolbar which only the most braindead web users would have installed. So you are in effect avoiding sites that the web's most braindead users would often visit.

Ranking sites based on "popularity" is great until you reach the point where the majority of users are not very intelligent. (cf. search engine users in 2004 with search engine users today.) When you reach that point, you get results where "quality" is determined by idiots (and SEO hats), not a group of intelligent peers.

dude123122• 14 years ago

Another Cool feature could be to exclude sites that use Adwords or Paid Search from the list too. Then it would really just be legit sites.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Add a way for me to put this as my search engine in my firefox search bar.

Please.

EDIT: In trying to accomplish this task I found an add-on that lets you do this for anything.

(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-to-search...)

taxonomyman30• 14 years ago

Awesome.

vidoss• 14 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking in 2001 => http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/The_20Other_20search_20engine

Glad to see someone did it now...

Suncho• 14 years ago

I have been wanting something like this for a while. It's even on my todo list. Thanks for saving me the work. I'll be using it all the time!

tsunamifury• 14 years ago

Searched my name... Got my website

taskstrike• 14 years ago

you should some how incorporate hipster into the search site's name.

goodgracious• 14 years ago

Who needs to imagine it? It's here.

Cat is out of the bag.

What is the Alexa list good for? Answer: Filtering out the boring, money-grubbing commercial sites. A truly GREAT idea.

A return to the good 'ole days. The non-commercial web.

Many young people who love today's www never got to experience it as it was before it became overrun with Google-ization and auto-generated garbage.

Take the ball and run with it. We ca reclaim the web. This is only the beginning.

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

Good idea. It's about time that search engines route around the power-law distributions of popular sites, popular bloggers and personalities to find the gems otherwise buried in the noise.

thar2012• 14 years ago

non-popular websites will start seeing some good traffic suddenly. It would be confusing for them :)

tinyjoe• 14 years ago

my website ranked 1st? guess i need to work harder T_T

stcredzero• 14 years ago

I wonder if there's an analogous hack for social news?

mswen• 14 years ago

I just tried it with a search for some competitive intelligence. I used the 100K removal option. I found a competitor in another country that had not made the top 2 pages on Google. It confirms that others are launching something similar to what I am building... but also the fact that it doesn't bubble to the top on Google means that the market space is not dominated yet.

pnathan• 14 years ago

Thanks.

Google has really killed the discoverability of the internet for me. I will be experimenting with this.

Best of luck.

Show HN: Imagine a search engine that removed top million sites from its index

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