What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
There are other problems as well. Popularity based rankings feed into themselves over time, creating the sort of extreme pareto distribution in popularity we see today where like a solid dozen of enormous websites get almost all of the traffic.
Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.
Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2 years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5 years).
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over individual interests.
I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
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There are other problems as well. Popularity based rankings feed into themselves over time, creating the sort of extreme pareto distribution in popularity we see today where like a solid dozen of enormous websites get almost all of the traffic.
Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.
Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it far more useful for me.
Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2 years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5 years).
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
wow, thanks for the quick action!