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I remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I coul

I remember reading in HN an idea about allowing people to customize the weights used to filter search results - a search engine that provided that, where I could use some curated configuration file. Maybe I could have profiles like "cooking", "programming", "news" and help the search engine even better to understand my intent. Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, and allow me a quick access to that list to manage it afterwards - ALSO, allow me to add a comment to remind myself WHY I did not want to see it anymore.

captn3m0 5y ago
https://felvin.com/ https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but it's still quite early.
- tommica 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, gotta look into this!
BarryMilo 5y ago
This is where ad-based businesses show their ugly side: The more control you have over what you see, the fewer ways they have to slip you inconspicuous ads. This is why all content feeds like Facebook and Twitter get vaguer as time goes by, and it's why Google will never give up control over results unless it legally has to.
- rchaud 5y ago
  It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and don't need to scroll further. Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad business.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    G*d forbid anyone ever stop scrolling. I was browsing airbnb the other day, looking at places in a small area (maybe 25 rentals) and was shocked/alarmed/saddened to discover that the app has infinite scrolling. Rather than the list ending once I’ve seen all 25 results, they just show them again in a different order.
    - BarryMilo 5y ago
      That's both garbage and outlandish design...
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Yeah. The dependency to adds, are a big reason why so much tech suck so much, despite trillions invested. Because those investments are not made, to show you clearly what you want to see, but to show you just enough, to not loose you while injection as much information garbage as possible. If we do not fix that, it will all just get worse, not better.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  If you control what articles and pages show up based on some searches you can impact elections. Forget ads, who would give up control every close election on the planet?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Not to mention the fact they police content. They'll refuse to associate with anyone they deem objectionable enough for any reason. This will deny sites their revenue and will lead to self-censorship to regain their favor. Nothing kills perfectly good websites faster than some offended person complaining and ads getting pulled.
lobocinza 5y ago
There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also whitelist so those are highlighted.
- potamic 5y ago
  Excellent! I was looking for precisely this. Next, I would also very much like to weed out image/video/map suggestions, related searches, people also ask and page snippets. The cognitive overload from navigating these giant banners and getting to my search results is getting worse by the day. But, how stable is this? I tried so hard doing this with greasemonkey. But google's DOM is ridiculously obfuscated and kept breaking frequently. So much for the semantic web, heh?
  - tapland 5y ago
    https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist It's on Firefox as well as Chrome, and apple stuff. It's like a gift from god that allows me to block pinterest image results. Not had any issues with it what so ever.
- tommica 5y ago
  Need to try this out!
kodah 5y ago
I use Neeva.com and I think one of their features resembles this idea. It is a paid for search engine though.
- matwood 5y ago
  I think neeva is interesting. Once payment and a login is required it changes the incentives and opens up new feature possibilities. One cool feature is linking your private cloud document storage making search very personal. It remains to be seen if they can get enough people to pay in order to keep going though.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    If they can search your private docs, they can see your private docs.
- tommica 5y ago
  Hmm, a paid search engine - wonder how they handle the spam SEO problem, but is an interesting idea
  - kodah 5y ago
    I'm not sure how they actually do it, but it works pretty well. When I search for things I almost always find what I'm looking for. I use it both for tech and for personal stuff.
- smallerfish 5y ago
  They won't let me try it because they "haven't launched in my region". Presumably that's because I'm in latin america, and they're conflating location and language.
- barkerja 5y ago
  Neeva has been pretty good in my experience, but the lack of ability to make it the default search engine in Safari (macOS and iOS) is what prevents me from using it 100%. That's obviously not at all a knock against Neeva. Safari needs to allow more flexibility in its search engine defaults. I've filed multiple radars/requests to Apple to make this setting more flexible and/or provide Neeva as an option.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
This is actually doable. There's a tweak to PageRank you can do (that's as old as the original paper[1]) that allows you to bias the ranking toward a certain set of websites. It works really well. While it's probably unfeasible (or at least really expensive) to do completely personalized rankings, that's just too much data, but segmenting off into areas like academia, blogosphere, tech, etc. is quite doable, and as the authors remark, this approach is highly resilient to manipulation from commercial interests. [1] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf
RileyJames 5y ago
Brave put out a white paper regarding a version of this. Have they followed up with a product/feature? It was the only portion of brave’s approach that was interesting to me. It’d be disappointing if they dropped it. Brave Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf
prirai 5y ago
Searx can make you do exactly that. It's really easily to get started with a self hosted serverand then you can customize it the way you want.
- tommica 5y ago
  Interesting, I did not know it could do that - need to take a look into it!
SteveGerencser 5y ago
Yahoo had a system along time ago where you could slide results more toward shopping or more toward informational. Like most features like that, it didn't last very long.
rchaud 5y ago
> Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, millionshort.com has a "block this domain" option. It can be useful to combine it with the filter "hide results from top 1,000 sites".
freediver 5y ago
Kagi Search has "lenses". I have a "Programming", "News 360" lens (news from all sides), HN lens, PDF/Whitepaper lens... You can see how it works here: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445298385800470529 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445298385800470529 (disclaimer: Kagi founder)

captn3m0 5y ago

https://felvin.com/ https://felvin.com/ is trying to build "Search profiles", but it's still quite early.

tommica 5y ago
Thanks for sharing, gotta look into this!

BarryMilo 5y ago

This is where ad-based businesses show their ugly side: The more control you have over what you see, the fewer ways they have to slip you inconspicuous ads. This is why all content feeds like Facebook and Twitter get vaguer as time goes by, and it's why Google will never give up control over results unless it legally has to.

rchaud 5y ago
It's also why every social network moved to an algorithmic feed. Had it remained chronological, our primitive brains would have noticed content from yesterday come up after a certain point, signaling to us that we are caught up and don't need to scroll further. Can't imagine how catastrophic that would be to their ad business.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  G*d forbid anyone ever stop scrolling. I was browsing airbnb the other day, looking at places in a small area (maybe 25 rentals) and was shocked/alarmed/saddened to discover that the app has infinite scrolling. Rather than the list ending once I’ve seen all 25 results, they just show them again in a different order.
  - BarryMilo 5y ago
    That's both garbage and outlandish design...
hutzlibu 5y ago
Yeah. The dependency to adds, are a big reason why so much tech suck so much, despite trillions invested. Because those investments are not made, to show you clearly what you want to see, but to show you just enough, to not loose you while injection as much information garbage as possible. If we do not fix that, it will all just get worse, not better.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 5y ago
If you control what articles and pages show up based on some searches you can impact elections. Forget ads, who would give up control every close election on the planet?
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Not to mention the fact they police content. They'll refuse to associate with anyone they deem objectionable enough for any reason. This will deny sites their revenue and will lead to self-censorship to regain their favor. Nothing kills perfectly good websites faster than some offended person complaining and ads getting pulled.

lobocinza 5y ago

There's a Chromium extension, uBlacklist, that does something similar. You can blacklist sites from search results and also whitelist so those are highlighted.

potamic 5y ago
Excellent! I was looking for precisely this. Next, I would also very much like to weed out image/video/map suggestions, related searches, people also ask and page snippets. The cognitive overload from navigating these giant banners and getting to my search results is getting worse by the day. But, how stable is this? I tried so hard doing this with greasemonkey. But google's DOM is ridiculously obfuscated and kept breaking frequently. So much for the semantic web, heh?
- tapland 5y ago
  https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist https://github.com/iorate/uBlacklist It's on Firefox as well as Chrome, and apple stuff. It's like a gift from god that allows me to block pinterest image results. Not had any issues with it what so ever.
tommica 5y ago
Need to try this out!

kodah 5y ago

I use Neeva.com and I think one of their features resembles this idea. It is a paid for search engine though.

matwood 5y ago
I think neeva is interesting. Once payment and a login is required it changes the incentives and opens up new feature possibilities. One cool feature is linking your private cloud document storage making search very personal. It remains to be seen if they can get enough people to pay in order to keep going though.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  If they can search your private docs, they can see your private docs.
tommica 5y ago
Hmm, a paid search engine - wonder how they handle the spam SEO problem, but is an interesting idea
- kodah 5y ago
  I'm not sure how they actually do it, but it works pretty well. When I search for things I almost always find what I'm looking for. I use it both for tech and for personal stuff.
smallerfish 5y ago
They won't let me try it because they "haven't launched in my region". Presumably that's because I'm in latin america, and they're conflating location and language.
barkerja 5y ago
Neeva has been pretty good in my experience, but the lack of ability to make it the default search engine in Safari (macOS and iOS) is what prevents me from using it 100%. That's obviously not at all a knock against Neeva. Safari needs to allow more flexibility in its search engine defaults. I've filed multiple radars/requests to Apple to make this setting more flexible and/or provide Neeva as an option.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

This is actually doable. There's a tweak to PageRank you can do (that's as old as the original paper[1]) that allows you to bias the ranking toward a certain set of websites. It works really well. While it's probably unfeasible (or at least really expensive) to do completely personalized rankings, that's just too much data, but segmenting off into areas like academia, blogosphere, tech, etc. is quite doable, and as the authors remark, this approach is highly resilient to manipulation from commercial interests. [1] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

RileyJames 5y ago

Brave put out a white paper regarding a version of this. Have they followed up with a product/feature? It was the only portion of brave’s approach that was interesting to me. It’d be disappointing if they dropped it. Brave Goggles: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/goggles.pdf

prirai 5y ago

Searx can make you do exactly that. It's really easily to get started with a self hosted serverand then you can customize it the way you want.

tommica 5y ago
Interesting, I did not know it could do that - need to take a look into it!

SteveGerencser 5y ago

Yahoo had a system along time ago where you could slide results more toward shopping or more toward informational. Like most features like that, it didn't last very long.

rchaud 5y ago

> Or just have the "don't show results from this site again" button from youtube taken into google results, millionshort.com has a "block this domain" option. It can be useful to combine it with the filter "hide results from top 1,000 sites".

freediver 5y ago

Kagi Search has "lenses". I have a "Programming", "News 360" lens (news from all sides), HN lens, PDF/Whitepaper lens... You can see how it works here: https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445298385800470529 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1445298385800470529 (disclaimer: Kagi founder)