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Comment by hawski | Hacker News Reader

I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage.

I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.

Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.

View on HN

https://millionshort.com/

This is terrific, I wanna add this as a ddg bang...

Just filled out ddg's suggestion form to add this as a bang. I'll let you know if it goes live.

This is awesome, never knew about this feature. I may have to give ddg another shot.

Looks like the site's having some issues right now. Using some of the search criteria redirects me to https://millionshort.com/500

Several search engines have had issues today, I haven't heard anything about a root cause though.

http://downdetector.com/status/bing

Awesome, filtered top 10^6, removed sites with ads and e-commerce, typed in "enigma machine" and got some great gems:

http://ciphermachines.com/index.html http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk/howitworks.html

If you're interested in Enigma machines and find yourself in Maryland, you can play with one at the NSA museum next to Ft. Meade.

http://enigma.louisedade.co.uk is 3rd result in google search for "enigma machine" though

I had that feeling of discovering Internet again when I used tor and surfed hidden websites for the first time and read beginner's wikis, opinions pieces such as The Matrix, etc.

I am not interested in most of the "deep web" but what you say sounds interesting. Could you please provide link to that Matrix thing? And other pieces you found interesting?

http://zqktlwi4fecvo6ri.onion/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is the wiki I stumbled upon when I first accessed hidden websites, the matrix rant is the first link, but it's not in the form of what I remember (PS: I do not endorse the content, it's mostly a critic of our society's mechanisms).

> It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.

Probably not, actually; the kind of pages you describe would almost always be leaf nodes on the web graph, so your spider would need to walk "through" the attention-whoring parts to get to them, whether you kept records of doing so or not. (And it'd be very inefficient to not.)

I don't know about that - I find that I get a lot of my information from sites that have user generated content such as Medium, reddit, and of course HN. I think it would be extremely hard to fit in sources like that to your search engine without letting in what I will admit is garbage. Would be very cool if it did manage to though!

Well, there was Yanoff's list which was pretty great. I think 94 was around the time I stopped having to remember a lot of IP addresses.

https://stumbleupon.com

I would love this

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