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Ask HN: What would your ideal search engine look like?

5 points by freediver 7y ago

User experience of modern search engines has not significantly changed in the last twenty years. If you had a magic wand how would you change your current search engine and why?

LinuxBender 7y ago
It would look like the initial release of Google, but without all the user tracking.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dredmorbius 7y ago
I'd split logic between remote and local, to amplify privacy. Capacity to search across currently open tabs/pages, and browser history. Capacity to individually set site weights, including blacklisting sites. Distinguish between modes, most especially "shopping" vs. "informational". Retail is killing the Web. Focus far more strongly on reputation for sites, authors, editors. Put skin in the game. Sub-domain filters for/against specific sources (e.g., blacklist specific YouTube, Medium, or Reddit channels / subs). Strongly favour sites using semantic markup usefully and validly. Assign and share "Web search death penalties" for abusive sites. A search engine which was very fast to spank black-hat SEO with short-lived (though escalating w/ recurrance) penalities would be highly useful. The notion that that act don't play might help a lot. Flip-side is appeals / corrections (see the examine.com story currently on HN). A general thought is that individual actions taken to tweak experience are (possibly) less subject to gaming than various other black-hat SEO tricks. Though that would likely change....
- freediver 7y ago
  Setting site weights is an interesting twist. Not sure how would a web based search engine achieve the ability to search across open tabs in your browser.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Either you'd need to incorporate logic into the browser, or have a local utility which could do this for you. Keep in mind that what a browser is or does is not written in stone, and much of its behaviour is an accident of history. There are interesting privacy issues raised, naturally. The idea of a set of relatively autonomous agents providing a Web-accessible documents management capability has occurred to me. Some aspects of this exist by way of proxies (Squid, Privoxy, Dansguardian, etc.), though there are significant empty niches.

5 points by freediver 7y ago

User experience of modern search engines has not significantly changed in the last twenty years. If you had a magic wand how would you change your current search engine and why?

LinuxBender 7y ago

It would look like the initial release of Google, but without all the user tracking.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dredmorbius 7y ago

I'd split logic between remote and local, to amplify privacy. Capacity to search across currently open tabs/pages, and browser history. Capacity to individually set site weights, including blacklisting sites. Distinguish between modes, most especially "shopping" vs. "informational". Retail is killing the Web. Focus far more strongly on reputation for sites, authors, editors. Put skin in the game. Sub-domain filters for/against specific sources (e.g., blacklist specific YouTube, Medium, or Reddit channels / subs). Strongly favour sites using semantic markup usefully and validly. Assign and share "Web search death penalties" for abusive sites. A search engine which was very fast to spank black-hat SEO with short-lived (though escalating w/ recurrance) penalities would be highly useful. The notion that that act don't play might help a lot. Flip-side is appeals / corrections (see the examine.com story currently on HN). A general thought is that individual actions taken to tweak experience are (possibly) less subject to gaming than various other black-hat SEO tricks. Though that would likely change....

freediver 7y ago
Setting site weights is an interesting twist. Not sure how would a web based search engine achieve the ability to search across open tabs in your browser.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Either you'd need to incorporate logic into the browser, or have a local utility which could do this for you. Keep in mind that what a browser is or does is not written in stone, and much of its behaviour is an accident of history. There are interesting privacy issues raised, naturally. The idea of a set of relatively autonomous agents providing a Web-accessible documents management capability has occurred to me. Some aspects of this exist by way of proxies (Squid, Privoxy, Dansguardian, etc.), though there are significant empty niches.