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Show HN: A search engine that doesn't track you, where users vote for results
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 8y agoThe whole design of 51% percent of users downvoting an entry and sending it to oblivion is NOT a design pattern we should be proliferating in the industry.
- jk2323 8y agoLordy lord. Now we don't only have to pay for links and SEO, now we also have to hire a shitload of Filipinos to up-vote sites....
- known 8y agoObvious question, how do you intend to make money?
- brentadamson 8y agoAdvertising that doesn't track users. Perhaps a freemium model for API usage with a very generous free tier.
- palerdot 8y agoNot sure how upvoting will make search better. Most of the search happens in a specific context, where users are just desperate to go to the desired result and not come back and vote on stuffs if it is relevant. Plus, even if it is done there is no way to know if the page is still relevant since the upvoting.
- Johnie 8y agoHow is this "Reddit-style"?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brentadamson 8y agoUsers upvote/downvote the results.
- groceryheist 8y agoYou upvote/downvote results. Crowdsourcing search ranking, what could go wrong? Edit: typo
- ASalazarMX 8y agoIdeal for those times when the echo chamber is not enough.
- kaoussi 8y agoIf you search you'll find that you can upvote the results, I guess that's what he means by reddit style!
- jwilk 8y agoReddit is known for having an appalling search function. When I see "Reddit-style search...", I immediately think of search that doesn't work.
- brentadamson 8y agoI meant that users can upvote/downvote the results. EDIT: To clarify - I've just referenced Reddit in this post. I don't plan to use it anywhere else.
- delecti 8y agoThat makes a lot more sense. My initial reaction was the same as the grandparent comment. I would suggest rewording the tagline to "Privacy respecting search engine with reddit style voting".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- codingdave 8y agoI'd drop any references to reddit - they are far from the only site with upvotes and downvotes, and while they have a rabid fan base, they also have a rabid detractor base. Better to just state your value props than to deliberately inherit the baggage from a contentious site.
- Raphmedia 8y agoA bit useless as a generic web search engine but I could see this being used as the search engine of a community website.
- antognini 8y agoI think the indexing needs some work. For the query "Kozai", Google, DDG, and Bing all return Wikipedia's page on the Kozai mechanism as either the top result or the second result. The lone result I get from Jive is a link to what appears to be a Japanese porn site. I can't even upvote the Wikipedia page because it doesn't show up.
- brentadamson 8y agoWe need more links indexed. The crawler that I wrote is pretty slow and right now we don't have a lot of documents indexed. I will be replacing the crawler I wrote with a faster one soon. Until then I have been using !bangs.
- ericst 8y agoHave you ever heard of https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/? Maybe it helps you to bootstrap. It's cool to see some new things happening in the search engine world.
- brentadamson 8y agoI've considered that but didn't really know anything about the organization and how long they'll be around. We're gonna give Colly a try: https://github.com/gocolly/colly https://github.com/gocolly/colly.
- snissn 8y agohttps://www.jivesearch.com/?q=0xbitcoin https://www.jivesearch.com/?q=0xbitcoin No results for 0xbitcoin Suggestions: Learn how to spell. Try something else.
- brentadamson 8y agoWe need to run the crawler longer...and we are going to be replacing the crawler with something that should be a lot faster.
- snissn 8y agoThe message "learn to spell" isn't the best one for a search engine
- sgdread 8y agoI really like the idea. However, let's think about abuse patterns: what prevents CEO agency from creating 1k t2.micro instances and clicking upvote for a link of interest and downvote all the competitors?
- brentadamson 8y agoWhat prevents their competitor from downvoting them? The rate limit applies equally to everyone. EDIT: The scoring function can also be customized. https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/vote/postgresql.go#L80-L94 https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/...
- jakear 8y agoThe local mom and pop shop aren’t going to be able to compete with Walmart. This only works if both entities have similar technical and financial status.
- brentadamson 8y agoBut there's an army of users that will ultimately decide.
- notheguyouthink 8y agoNeat idea, scary to implement though. As everyone mentions, manipulation is a massive concern. With that said, perhaps peer-promoted links would solve this issue. If you built a network of peers (my brother, his friend, his friends friend) and modulated upvoted by their abstraction to me, it could make for a nice up voting system. Anyone know if that style of voting has been implemented by anyone? Does it suffer fatal flaws? Sounds difficult to implement, for starters.
- brentadamson 8y agoThe rate limit applies to everyone equally so you can write a bot to upvote all your links but someone can then write a bot to downvote them. The default scoring system is meant to be overwritten and can help weed out the bot attempts: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/vote/postgresql.go#L80-L94 https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/.... Reddit has tons of manipulation by users yet relevancy seems to be very good there.
- notheguyouthink 8y agoIt does? Reddit was manipulated to a massive degree and, as far as many are concerned, throws away any credibility on the relevancy of popularity.
- brentadamson 8y agoI visit my subscribed subreddits frequently b/c I find posts that are highly relevant to my interests.
- notheguyouthink 8y agoSo did (and still do) a lot of political discussions on Reddit. Then we find out that they're heavily being manipulated by Russia. Those people thought those posts were organically, communally upvoted and vetted. Turns out, they were manipulated heavily. Any heavily manipulated system could have organic and true content for some people. I think the goal would be to have trust in the platform. Reddit, as of late, has no trust with anything of meaning. It has been shown to be manipulated by companies and governments. I could hire a firm to push my content in your favorite subreddits.. so I struggle to see how Reddit is remotely a good platform for non-manipulated discovering content. Many people don't like that Google can alter their searches, providing bad incentives. A Reddit-like search now opens up the ability to manipulate your searches to ad agencies, governments, bad actors, etc.
- enoughisenough 8y ago"that doesn't track you" ... a word to the people with business degrees that larp as programmers on here. In order to track you it would need additional work, this just means there was no tracking ADDED. This is not a feature by any measure.
- ulyssesgrant 8y agojudging by the amount of hateful comments here, I'd say you are really onto something :) seems like a neat idea I'd love to see proven out, keep it up!
- brentadamson 8y agoI think the comments have been very helpful!
- kristerv 8y agoI searched for "porn". Got bad results like it's 2004. Neext :D Cool idea to mash up though. Have you calculated how many people need to actively vote on stuff for the good results to actually get to the top?
- brentadamson 8y agoWell, if there are no other votes for a given query then an upvoted link will go to the top. Once it's there then that link is now more visible to others who can either agree or disagree. EDIT: Like I've pointed out in other comments the default scoring system can be customized and that behavior could be changed.
- imh 8y agoI tried four searches. 'smbc', 'xkcd', 'reddit', and 'google'. None returned what you'd expect. The search for 'google' was especially weird. I'm surprised to see a search engine that can't find the most visited page on the internet.
- brentadamson 8y agoThis is very early stage...
- DoctorOetker 8y agothe search engine doesn't return anything for "quantum cutting phosphor"
- soared 8y agoThis is an excellent idea. I'm assuming HN is getting an early preview, but if not I would definitely put a one liner on the landing page that explains what it does a bit. I do think in the future you should market it with the two differentiators more separate. "Show HN: A Reddit-style search engine where users upvote and downvotes links. It also doesn't track you!" IMO thats a better product position.
- brentadamson 8y agoYeah, that's what I meant...wish I could edit the title. EDIT: I'm not going to edit the landing page as not all users know what reddit is. The HN community knows reddit but post title could clearly be better.
- dang 8y agoOK I took a crack at reworking the title to express both your points. Email us if you want it changed again. Good luck with the project! (Submitted title was "Show HN: A Reddit-style search engine that doesn't track you".)
- brentadamson 8y agothank you!
- forapurpose 8y agoFWIW, I just spent a minute on the Github page (a normal amount of time for something like this) and had no idea anyone could upvote and downvote links until I read the GP comment. In fact, I just searched the Github page for "reddit" and for "vote", and found nothing. I don't know what this product is or does. Does it run locally? Is there a hosted version available? How is it different than DuckDuckGo or Startpage? Is there a voting feature, as the GP says? A voting feature would make it interesting to me with one major caveat: It depends on who is doing the voting. For example, if I could restrict voting to HN users then it could be a very useful way to search for tech or for many intellectual topics but not for housing in Tokyo. A random subset of the general public's votes on tech topics would not be useful to me as a professional. Political topics seem like a minefield.
- hjek 8y agoThis looks super interesting. Somehow similar to Searx[1], except that Jive even has its own crawler, whereas Searx really just is a metasearch engine. I haven't tried setting up an instance myself, but it appears to be quite simple. One thing: I found it a bit unclear what the voting does. Thanks for sharing this. We need more truly free search engines, and not just non-free ones trying to appear "open source friendly", like DuckDuckGo[2]. [1]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ [2]: https://duck.co/help/open-source/opensource-overview https://duck.co/help/open-source/opensource-overview
- brentadamson 8y agoThe voting reorders the search results. https://www.jivesearch.com/ https://www.jivesearch.com/. You will need Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL as well as run the Wikipedia & MusicBrainz dumps. Let me know if you run into any issues.
- lazyant 8y ago"about us" returns 500
- dehugger 8y agoThe idea is solid, but I think you need to do some of domain weighting until you get users. For example, I tried searching "League of Legends", and I got nothing but a whole page of links to various hacking websites and gold sellers (which makes no sense in the context of the game), all of them at zero votes. This is pretty discouraging, and I don't think it makes much sense to make the first 10 or 20 people to search for a topic sort through (and vote on) the entire Internet worth of keyword related links until things are in some semblance of order.
- brentadamson 8y agoI've noticed the same. Probably need to re-weight the fields: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/elasticsearch.go#L34-L50 https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/...