Show HN: Privacy conscious, discovery focused search engine – Whize (Alpha) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Privacy conscious, discovery focused search engine – Whize (Alpha)

alpha.whize.co

6 pointsGrimm111 comments

Well for now I sadly don't see any use above the github search.

What will the first dedicated "discovery" feature be?

Focusing on discovery sounds amazing, but just adding noise to a "perfect" google-like ranking would just degrade the search result overall.

edit: I could imagine ranking harshly for quality of content and a focusing less on direct relevance (e.g. keyword occurrence) but rather "proximity" of the results. With proximity I mean topical or social relation between your query and the result. Look for Wordpress, find other CMS' and WP-plugins.

But quality and proximity are both so much harder to measure than just pulling the keyword matches to the top.

edit2: for visibility of startups I could rather imagine a hand-curated and sorted list of tools

So to the point of your first edit that is basically what we demo here in regards to GitHub we have some metrics in regards to the repos we've been tracking and we have various knobs that control how fast a top result would degrade from it's position while trying to maintain topical relevance in the results. The difficult part is with GitHub you have some canned metrics you can use as an approximation for quality and novelty that aren't immediately obvious for the rest of the web. We have some thoughts in mind though of how we can tackle that.

For number 2 it's interesting that you mention that, our initial inspiration for this was the awesome lists which if you look those up are hand curated lists of different topics that people have put together. We wanted something wider in that we want to be able to accommodate a much wider array of interests and we though by figuring something out algorithmically we could do it for anything we've crawled. What we didn't like about those lists is they're static, the top item in the list is going to stay that way we wanted to create something that will refresh itself and provide continuous use in discovering new things about some topic of interest.

maybe you could show what is novel about the search result a bit better?

So like some human understand able description from the metrics we are using? "This website is fairly new and is seeing a lot of active contribution." "This website's content is different from other websites in the same category."

Exactly.

Or if you mix them in a smart way maybe explain that: ("we promote projects that were at least a bit active within the last x month and ...").

Maybe "top lists" could work? most active, most unique, most collaboration

To give some context, for this demo we crawled the entirety of public GitHub to show off our idea of what we mean by novel. We chose GitHub because we figured HN might like to see some cooler repos for things they are interested in.

We have the capability to crawl about a hundred million sites a day and are figuring out where to go from here.

If you want to learn more about what we're doing. https://medium.com/@iantbutler01/existing-search-engines-fai...

> entirety of public GitHub to show off our idea

Well, I tried searching for my public repo and end up with 0 results. Same with my username.

If it's newer than a few weeks ago it's not in there, we also dropped about 150k-300k results on indexing and figured it really wasn't a concern considering it's an alpha. Sorry about that, the index has about 1.4m records in it though.

Worth noting too you may just not meet our idea of novel if your score is sufficiently low you are not ranked.

> meet our idea of novel

Thanks for letting me know.

Always welcome to build a competing service with your idea of what is novel.

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