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Comment by bradhilton | Hacker News Reader

For medical advice I would see more serious articles/blog posts in search results and fewer listicles.

For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads.

For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.

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It's funny, I've had almost embarrassing success building a trivial recipe filter for my search engine. The code itself is comically simple[1], I just count how many recipe-words I find (from a manual dictionary), and then add a small penalty for excessively lengthy texts. Very much a soviet space pencil approach. It's hard to assess recall, but the precision seems to be in the 80%+ range.

Check it: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=scallops&profile=f...

[1] https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu/src/branc...

NICE! I like it, thanks for sharing!

> For programming questions I don't want to see the sites that just scrape and repackage stackoverflow questions; for a company run by software developers they have to know about this problem lol.

This fact alone tells me they're not willing to take search result quality seriously. I'm sure medical professionals feel the same way about relevant content that is scraped and republished.

> For meal recipes I would just like to see the recipe and not a blog post with dozens of ads.

Why not just buy a cookbook? It doesn't seem like the convenience of accessing recipes at the touch of a button is worth the tradeoff of ads.

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