3 ms·
I beleive that there is a place in the world for a new search engine. People say that Google is good enough, but I find it hard to use Google to find the things
by timthelion 10y ago
I beleive that there is a place in the world for a new search engine. People say that Google is good enough, but I find it hard to use Google to find the things that I search for. Here is how I would upon Google:
I often find that I search for "vegan pancake recipe" and end up at a page with lots of images and it is very hard for me to find the ingredients list. Google does a poor job here. They should give preference to simpler sites where it is easier for me to find the information I'm looking for. Instead, they seem to actually give preference to complex sites. If their job is to help me search for the information, then they shouldn't give links to haystacks. They have tried to improve upon this with their answer feature where they quote websites. This is, IMO, the wrong way to do things.
Instead, the search engine should be a desktop application which is more pervasive than a website can be. It needs to run natively, and not be cloud based, both for privacy, performance, and for the ability to integrate well with the system.
When I search for "vegan pancake recipies", if the search engine is going to give me a result which contains 3-5 pages of text and images before the ingredients list, it should automatically scroll the web browser window down to the actual recipe.
This desktop application should also build a context profile based on what I am doing on my computer. This context profile shouldn't be uploaded to the internet, but it is still usefull. For example, I should be able to select a string in my terminal and press the search icon in the sytem tray. This should bring up a stack exchange question containing the exact text of the string I selected.
I should also be able to select a set of websites which I want to use as my search "domain". I might give my search domain as "the documentation to Python3, the Docker API reference, and stack exchange". This whould make it so that those "feeling lucky" links would work much better.
The search engine should also present image results which are NOT WATERMARKED before ones which are!
I should be able to write a markup for things I need to search for, and then enter a "search engine research wizard". The makup would look like so:
"We had a great time at [Park on that hill in prague???] park. It was so sunny! The temperature was [Prague temperature on 27th of march ???] which is [Average Prague temperatures in March ???] for this time of year."
The search engine would then, when shown this text, would allow you to right click on the bracketed areas, search for the text in them, and then, by selecting parts of wikipedia articles, fill in the blanks.
The search engine should use accessibility APIs to record the text of the windows that I have open. I should then be able to use the search engine as a kind of memory store which I can search. If I want to know what that awsome new tiling window manager written in Rust was called, I should be able to search full text of my browsing history and open up the previous HN page where the tiling window manger was presented.