Show HN: Prototype for a New Search Engine | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Prototype for a New Search Engine

4 pointsbreck10 comments

Here's my wire frame:

<Logo>

[Enter your query] (Search All Sites) (Search Only Ad-Free Sites)

Brilliant or bananas, what do you think?

The problem it solves for me is when there's a story that 100 people have written about, and I want to find the best one to share, which almost always is one without ads.

Google is very broken for this use case, because they seem to prioritize sites with ads.

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The web is awash with articles written and published that have no ads, but consist of content which has been written to promote products/services where these products/services have paid for that content to appear and rank well organically. What I presume you call ads can be viewed a transparent boosting of ranking transparently using money. So binary classifcation of ads/no ads is going to tricky.

I would use it. You could probably wrap current search engines and crawl sites for <ad> tags etc. and label them as ad vs non ad from there in very basic way and them get more complicated with built-up heuristics.

There are search engines that don't include ads... Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant and probably others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines You could also use browser extensions uBound Origin and Privacy Badger to take control.

Sorry I can see how I wasn't clear.

Ads on *search results page* are OK.

No *search results* to pages that contain ads.

> There are search engines that don't include ads... Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant and probably others

Ecosia and Qwant use Microsoft Advertising. StartPage use AdSense.

I like the idea! There are a lot of websites that have so many ads the article is impossible to read.

Mine would go:

<Logo>

[Enter your query] (Search All Sites) (Search Only Sites you've white-listed over the years, and "machine-learning guesses of similar sites" to those)

Where whitelisted in my personal case = Reddit, HN, StackOverflow, Slatestarcodex, nomadlist, airlines you regularly fly, government regulations you regularly check, etc

And where "Search All Sites" doesn't include Pinterest and its myriad TLDs.

Oh this is a great idea!

Does Google still let you create your own custom Search Engines? I forget.

I think there could be a pretty native way to make a working prototype of this idea (just add 1,000s+ of ad free approved domains).

I'd use it.

[x] exclude alexa top 100,000 sites

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