7 ms·

What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages

What drew me to AltaVista was that it gave me results that didn't exist elsewhere. It took some boolean gymnastics to get precise results, or going a few pages deep, but stuff, if it existed, was findable. I almost wish there were less precise and more obscure options out there today. A search engine that purposefully didn't index mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites.

rangersanger 6y ago
I would happily pay $5 a month For an ad free search engine that didn’t index Pinterest.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  Working on it.
  - slater 6y ago
    Oh?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Honestly wouldn’t it be against EU antitrust policy to explicitly do this?
  - dotancohen 6y ago
    It would work if instead of deindexing Pintrest specifically, the end user could enter a list of sites that they wish to never see results for.
- dotancohen 6y ago
  I'm with you on this. I would pay far less, $1/month would be the point where I would begin considering it. There are just too many "only $5" services and they would add up quickly if I were to allow myself that amount of money. The problem with this model, though, is support. A service with 100 million untrained end users each paying a dollar will need to provide quality customer service to 100 million untrained end users. It is much easier to sell ads to 10,000 "affiliates" who feel that they have some special arrangement and thus accept some responsibility of their own, and make $10,000 off each of those.
  - true_religion 6y ago
    I agree there are too many $5 services, but a search engine is something that I use every waking hour of my day. I get so much use from it, that $5 per month is a bargin. I would definitely pay Google just to be able to remove some sites permanently from my results. They're just spam to me, even if Google thinks they are legitimate.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yes, exactly right. If people are paying any amount at all they expect it to work and work perfectly. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but it does quickly become unfeasible at scale with users who have no training at all. Then on top of that the skimming the payment processors do makes a large percentage of that $1/month go to transaction fees. Charging yearly helps with that but many people won't want to do that.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Facebook makes $50 per user per year, so I would assume $1 per month is an order of magnitude less than what google is making from you at the moment. $10 per month is probably more realistic.
- enriquto 6y ago
  I'd love an option to setup domains where no search results are to be returned. Of course pinterest, but also quora, (and sometimes reddit), etc.
  - pault 6y ago
    -site:Pinterest.com
    - mishac 6y ago
      That doesn't work well for me because I get still get pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ca, pitnerest.it etc etc. I guess we need wildcard domain exlclusion.
      - LordNight 6y ago
        The correct command is -inurl:pinterest. Additionally, for those, who likes to add reddit in the search query, i'd also like to recommend " inurl:forum OR inurl:board " (note also that forum and forums gives different results for some reason). Personally, I like to do broad searches on google to discover new stuff, but for the past 7 or 8 years, google often returns ~100 result instead of the usual 1000000+. And, contrary to the logic, adding various inurl: commands actualy gives you more results instead of limiting them and thus significantly improves searching capabilities.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites. This requires users to be involved. Filters, refinement, user preferences. etc etc. Search is a powerful tool, and the power has been growing exponentially since 1995. But, almost all of that power is channeled into instant results, intuitiveness, "sane defaults" and such. All the capabilities are in the background and the assumed user is lowest denominator on all fronts. The low effort, low technical capabilities, low understanding, etc. This is most people (me included) most of the time, but not all of the time. Maybe I want to filter seo spam (like pinterest) more aggressively. Etc. This isn't a slam on google really. One thing can't do everything and the thing google search does is what most people need most of the time. It's definitely the thing that makes the most money. But... none of a search engines power has been channeled into making search a power tool. It's a tool that everyone uses many times per day, but there is no learning curve. No getting better. You can't really invest effort and get rewarded for that effort. Pity really, all this power is there. It's right under the surface. Let us be more than the lazy, dumb user sometimes. Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.
  - abraae 6y ago
    Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.
- disown 6y ago
  or you could just add "-pinterest" to your search query and save yourself $5.
- layer8 6y ago
  I’m using a search shortcut that just adds “-pinterest” to all searches (and also activates Google verbatim search mode).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ajnin 6y ago
  I'm using the following User Script to remove specific domains from Google search results. It does the job well enough for me. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
- kome 6y ago
  google with filters for a dollar a month would be awesome, like a function to "block this domain forever"... it would clean my search results from the annoying offenders. and i would gather user inputted blocked domains data to produce better search results for non subscribing users...
- mech422 6y ago
  The really annoying part about pinterest, is I never seem to be able to get back to the original directions/plans/whatever. Its like "Hey, look at this cool stuff I won't tell you how to make, even though I swiped it from a HOWTO site"
- mech422 6y ago
  I would also pay to have google freaking remember my search preferences. You've got my dang account - pull the prefs. from it.
tams 6y ago
Not exactly the same approach that you describe, but Million Short allows you to exclude the most popular websites from your search results. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/
_Microft 6y ago
I wish there were still a search engine that followed my query strings and operators to the letter instead of attempting to be extra clever. Even Bing seems to be doing that no longer.
- sshagent 6y ago
  oh god yes, that would be nice. I know what i typed stupid search engine, if i put it in quotes...i only want that exact phrase. Don't just cast that aside and search for the words individually.
- chris_f 6y ago
  We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.
  - dheera 6y ago
    ... until you want to search for something verbatim with quotes in it. Google doesn't seem to respect escaped quotes like "hello \"this\" is a test" which is quite surprising to me considering how they invent programming languages and all.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I imagine this is because the punctuation isn’t in their index at all, so it makes no difference how you format the query.
      - derefr 6y ago
        Is there an whole-Web search engine that isn’t a fulltext search engine, but rather works more like grepping a virtual text file that contains the entire Internet, such that one could match on punctuation and so forth?
        jeffbee 6y ago
foobarian 6y ago
Same, at one point the size of AltaVista's index was vastly above all the competition and was the best place to go for finding obscure stuff. With the boolean filters it was possible to exhaustively search the web. Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.
dalbasal 6y ago
>>if it existed, was findable This is really the precedent that mattered, I think. Remember one line of a poem? You can probably find the rest. Recall a Douglas Adams piece about rice farming in Bali or Java or something... you can find it. As you say, it took boolean gymnastics. But, that really just means modifying your search terms and scrolling through some results. Being less powerful than 2020 google kind of put more power/responsibility in users' hands. A user needed to use a search engine like a tool. I want what you want too... Everything google (mail/search/youtube, etc)... but designed for more user effort. Finding the best-for-most result instantly is great, but sometimes you want the tool to help you find a result on page 112 within a few minutes. Bring back a little bit of a directory feel even. Let me narrow down, refine and shape results gradually. Assume that I will rummage through a bunch of crap to find what I want.
Terretta 6y ago
Yes... Enjoyed AltaVista and FAST (AllTheWeb)[1] for precision searching. That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_N... 2. https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-software/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-s... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines EDIT: Using the search engine Qwant, I was able to find an original EWS (Excite for Web Servers) help page: http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html At the time, it was amazingly out of the box: Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site. Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections. In particular, one can: - define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search, - design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection, - index that collection, monitoring the progress, and search the collection. With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The "near" operator was particularly useful.

rangersanger 6y ago

I would happily pay $5 a month For an ad free search engine that didn’t index Pinterest.

kordlessagain 6y ago
Working on it.
- slater 6y ago
  Oh?
jeffbee 6y ago
Honestly wouldn’t it be against EU antitrust policy to explicitly do this?
- dotancohen 6y ago
  It would work if instead of deindexing Pintrest specifically, the end user could enter a list of sites that they wish to never see results for.
dotancohen 6y ago
I'm with you on this. I would pay far less, $1/month would be the point where I would begin considering it. There are just too many "only $5" services and they would add up quickly if I were to allow myself that amount of money. The problem with this model, though, is support. A service with 100 million untrained end users each paying a dollar will need to provide quality customer service to 100 million untrained end users. It is much easier to sell ads to 10,000 "affiliates" who feel that they have some special arrangement and thus accept some responsibility of their own, and make $10,000 off each of those.
- true_religion 6y ago
  I agree there are too many $5 services, but a search engine is something that I use every waking hour of my day. I get so much use from it, that $5 per month is a bargin. I would definitely pay Google just to be able to remove some sites permanently from my results. They're just spam to me, even if Google thinks they are legitimate.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Yes, exactly right. If people are paying any amount at all they expect it to work and work perfectly. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but it does quickly become unfeasible at scale with users who have no training at all. Then on top of that the skimming the payment processors do makes a large percentage of that $1/month go to transaction fees. Charging yearly helps with that but many people won't want to do that.
- Closi 6y ago
  Facebook makes $50 per user per year, so I would assume $1 per month is an order of magnitude less than what google is making from you at the moment. $10 per month is probably more realistic.
enriquto 6y ago
I'd love an option to setup domains where no search results are to be returned. Of course pinterest, but also quora, (and sometimes reddit), etc.
- pault 6y ago
  -site:Pinterest.com
  - mishac 6y ago
    That doesn't work well for me because I get still get pinterest.co.uk, pinterest.ca, pitnerest.it etc etc. I guess we need wildcard domain exlclusion.
    - LordNight 6y ago
      The correct command is -inurl:pinterest. Additionally, for those, who likes to add reddit in the search query, i'd also like to recommend " inurl:forum OR inurl:board " (note also that forum and forums gives different results for some reason). Personally, I like to do broad searches on google to discover new stuff, but for the past 7 or 8 years, google often returns ~100 result instead of the usual 1000000+. And, contrary to the logic, adding various inurl: commands actualy gives you more results instead of limiting them and thus significantly improves searching capabilities.
dalbasal 6y ago
I think this can be generalised as "more power to users." You might want to filter Pinterest. OP wants to avoid mainstream news, social media, nor shopping/product sites. This requires users to be involved. Filters, refinement, user preferences. etc etc. Search is a powerful tool, and the power has been growing exponentially since 1995. But, almost all of that power is channeled into instant results, intuitiveness, "sane defaults" and such. All the capabilities are in the background and the assumed user is lowest denominator on all fronts. The low effort, low technical capabilities, low understanding, etc. This is most people (me included) most of the time, but not all of the time. Maybe I want to filter seo spam (like pinterest) more aggressively. Etc. This isn't a slam on google really. One thing can't do everything and the thing google search does is what most people need most of the time. It's definitely the thing that makes the most money. But... none of a search engines power has been channeled into making search a power tool. It's a tool that everyone uses many times per day, but there is no learning curve. No getting better. You can't really invest effort and get rewarded for that effort. Pity really, all this power is there. It's right under the surface. Let us be more than the lazy, dumb user sometimes. Google have reversed the User Interface paradigm. Instead of users learning the software and telling it what to do, the software learns the user. I don't necessarily mean NNs or personalisation. I mean that the paraign is software-centric. "If the user does X, how should the software respond?" instead of "If the user user wants Y, how does she make the software do it?" That's great for intuitiveness, but it also creates a frame where the software gets better over time but the user never does.
- visarga 6y ago
  > think this can be generalised as "more power to users." I agree, we need more power to control. There should be more than one recipe for ranking and filtering, and we should have more to say about what information is being hidden from us. Society is diverse, a single formula automatically discriminates some groups. Let people make the choice.
- abraae 6y ago
  Yeah, I also want filters, refinement, user preferences. etc. And I want it to be social - I want to search using the same filters that Tim Bray uses. Or I want to use the filters that the people use who in aggregate tend to click through to the same results pages that I visit. So much amazing stuff could be done, but here we are controlled by algorithms that treat us all as brain dead sheep who only want to know about what the Kardashians are up to. I suspect that Google knows about these desires, but would prefer the world where everyone is a sheep.
disown 6y ago
or you could just add "-pinterest" to your search query and save yourself $5.
layer8 6y ago
I’m using a search shortcut that just adds “-pinterest” to all searches (and also activates Google verbatim search mode).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ajnin 6y ago
I'm using the following User Script to remove specific domains from Google search results. It does the job well enough for me. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...
kome 6y ago
google with filters for a dollar a month would be awesome, like a function to "block this domain forever"... it would clean my search results from the annoying offenders. and i would gather user inputted blocked domains data to produce better search results for non subscribing users...
mech422 6y ago
The really annoying part about pinterest, is I never seem to be able to get back to the original directions/plans/whatever. Its like "Hey, look at this cool stuff I won't tell you how to make, even though I swiped it from a HOWTO site"
mech422 6y ago
I would also pay to have google freaking remember my search preferences. You've got my dang account - pull the prefs. from it.

tams 6y ago

Not exactly the same approach that you describe, but Million Short allows you to exclude the most popular websites from your search results. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/

_Microft 6y ago

I wish there were still a search engine that followed my query strings and operators to the letter instead of attempting to be extra clever. Even Bing seems to be doing that no longer.

sshagent 6y ago
oh god yes, that would be nice. I know what i typed stupid search engine, if i put it in quotes...i only want that exact phrase. Don't just cast that aside and search for the words individually.
chris_f 6y ago
We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.
- dheera 6y ago
  ... until you want to search for something verbatim with quotes in it. Google doesn't seem to respect escaped quotes like "hello \"this\" is a test" which is quite surprising to me considering how they invent programming languages and all.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    I imagine this is because the punctuation isn’t in their index at all, so it makes no difference how you format the query.
    - derefr 6y ago
      Is there an whole-Web search engine that isn’t a fulltext search engine, but rather works more like grepping a virtual text file that contains the entire Internet, such that one could match on punctuation and so forth?
      - jeffbee 6y ago

foobarian 6y ago

Same, at one point the size of AltaVista's index was vastly above all the competition and was the best place to go for finding obscure stuff. With the boolean filters it was possible to exhaustively search the web. Unfortunately that didn't scale with the size of the web; at one point the amount of pages got large enough that doing a smart ranking like Google did became more effective than the "look at all pages of results" usage required for AltaVista. It felt like a monumental transition, like when a program gets too big for main memory and causes the computer to start swapping to disk.

dalbasal 6y ago

>>if it existed, was findable This is really the precedent that mattered, I think. Remember one line of a poem? You can probably find the rest. Recall a Douglas Adams piece about rice farming in Bali or Java or something... you can find it. As you say, it took boolean gymnastics. But, that really just means modifying your search terms and scrolling through some results. Being less powerful than 2020 google kind of put more power/responsibility in users' hands. A user needed to use a search engine like a tool. I want what you want too... Everything google (mail/search/youtube, etc)... but designed for more user effort. Finding the best-for-most result instantly is great, but sometimes you want the tool to help you find a result on page 112 within a few minutes. Bring back a little bit of a directory feel even. Let me narrow down, refine and shape results gradually. Assume that I will rummage through a bunch of crap to find what I want.

Terretta 6y ago

Yes... Enjoyed AltaVista and FAST (AllTheWeb)[1] for precision searching. That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_N... 2. https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-software/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-s... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines EDIT: Using the search engine Qwant, I was able to find an original EWS (Excite for Web Servers) help page: http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html At the time, it was amazingly out of the box: Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site. Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections. In particular, one can: - define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search, - design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection, - index that collection, monitoring the progress, and search the collection. With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

The "near" operator was particularly useful.