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> Well, I built sort of exactly this: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ What's the elevator pitch? What do you actually do that is sp
by onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> Well, I built sort of exactly this: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
What's the elevator pitch? What do you actually do that is special?
From the about section:
> This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.
> The software for this search engine is all custom-built, and all crawling and indexing is done in-house. The project is open source. Feel free to poke about in the source code or contribute to the development!
But that doesn't really give me much info.
- tigerlily 4y agoI know it’s of low value to ask, but who really gives a shit?
- interroboink 4y agoI do! (also low value, perhaps :)
- tigerlily 4y agoSigh, I guess I should’ve clarified I meant “who cares whether or not there’s an elevator pitch, this is just something that someone thought we all needed and would be cool to build”. FWIW I think it is cool and much needed.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThe point is to surface human websites and discriminate against content mills, click funnels and e-commerce. For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether real humans link to the website. It's not a Google replacement by any measure, it's meant as a complement, but if you are looking for more in-depth content on a topic than you can find elsewhere, it's often a good starting point.
- spacemadness 4y agoI like the idea of a search engine that acts as a sort of filter for known dark patterns along with returning useful results. Limiting on javascript quantity seems like a sledgehammer approach, but I like the spirit of it all the same.
- droidist2 4y ago> For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts? [1] https://learningsynths.ableton.com https://learningsynths.ableton.com
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYeah, those sited go out the window entirely. It's a search engine for documents, not applications.
- iakh 4y agoWhy should it matter if a website is marked up on the server side or client side to a search engine?
- spc476 4y agoWhy should I download 50M of Javascript implementing a buggy, bespoke browsing engine to render perhaps 1k of text when I'm using a browser that is already capable of rendering 1k of text? For example, I used to enjoy browsing the C2 wiki, but recently they decided they needed to experiment with their own Javascript based browser, thus rendering their site unreadable unless you are using the very latest web browser (that needs to be updated every 20 minutes mind you).
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI don't know why it matters, but enforcing a JS budget turns out to rather effectively reduce the amount of problem websites down to nearly none. Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.