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Comment by razemio | Hacker News Reader

Googled "Best smartphone 2021" which resulted in crappy result. Maybe I am missing what significant categories actually means?

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I agree those results are not helpful.

The poster did say it was mostly for STEM subjects though...

More importantly though, I think "Best smartphone 2021" is really a search that has been conditioned on the crap google gives back now. At best you might expect to find a "best smartphones" listicle or something.

This is just a whitelisted search, so in my 5 min playing with it, it looks like popular or consumer queries are more likely to just provide reddit or wikipedia links, while more technical searches land on SO or documentation sites.

I think with a little tuning, this approach is great. Given the modern internet and all the crap there is, a manual whitelist of sites that are actually legit is always going to be superior to an algorithmic approach.

I agree. It is a very promising approach to fine tune Google for your own needs.

(obviously: this is subjective, so what's significant to me may not be to you.)

Honestly I just created this search engine for myself to find things more easily while programming or studying (I study biology, cs and ai; and philosophy in my free time, so expect results the best results for queries related to those subjects). I think those subjects also appeal to the HN audience, that's why I shared it here. When I'm not doing those things, I just use Google or DDG because they have better results for day-to-day queries.

That being said, I'm definitely interested in helping improve other people's search as well (reason I'm posting at all), so let me know if you have suggestions for sites to add!

Thanks for sharing. My initial comment sounded a bit harsh. I am sorry for that. I will look into fine tuning it for my needs. It is an interesting approach to a very annoying problem.

NP :) It's exciting to have people using & commenting on something I build.

> I will look into fine tuning it for my needs. It is an interesting approach to a very annoying problem.

If a premium version were available with a customizable whitelist, would you pay for that? The API is around $5 / 1000 searches so it would cost about the same.

Yes, a product which cleans my search from most referral sites is something I would pay for.

How would you define a good result for that query? It seems like the only thing you could expect from that query is a page of advertising, since the "best X" without any criteria is a concept that doesn't exist in reality.

Somewhat true. A perfect awnser for such a query would be a page like tomshardware where the best smartphones for multiple categories would have been nominated. A normal Google search actually does return that, after some scrolling. This however is ofc heavily based on my browsing history.

Which search engine returns good results for such a query?

There is none to my knowledge. That is why I tried it. Google returns at least links from tomshardware, wired and Android Authority after a few scrolls.

The point I was attempting to make is that what you are looking for doesn't exist within the realm of authentic websites made by people. The only ones making content to match such a query are deliberately attempting to match it because there is so little quality content. So what you get is at best the sort of useless content mills that seem to crop up on Google.

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