Search could be so much better. And I don't mean chatbots with web access

This is just an ad without any context?

Search could be better? Yes, yes it could.

I search for words, can even indicate I want search results with a keyword included and it will be ignored. And then I have to sift between what is the search result, and what is an ad.

And if I get another quora answer....

But, this post? it was a waste. We do some hand wavy stuff, come try us.

I want a search engine that only returns results containing words I specify. Is that asking too much? Google is not that search engine.

I have been playing with idea of one big SQLite for domains. I can search it relatively fast, find things related to "amiga", "emulator" etc.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I must admit, that this is a difficult task. There are many domains for "hotels", "casinos", so I have to protect myself, just as google agains spam.

Too many steps, why do I have to signup? Why do I have to create an engine.

Remove all of this, just let me directly use your app, I want to search and create engines on the fly.

I don't need to save them for future uses, if I am not going to use your app even once.

If you want this to take off, it needs to just work, no extra steps unless I want to.

Credit to @ziftface — I should’ve included more examples in the original post. MatterRank is useful when you want results with specific qualitative traits that go beyond keyword matching. You can ask for stuff like “written by a woman,” “mentions these specific lines from a movie,” or “talks about X/Y/Z but avoids A/B.” Since it reads the full content, not just metadata or SEO signals, it lets you be a lot more precise in ways that traditional search engines just don’t support.

> It assumes we don't know what we want.

Does it? I understand there are issues with spam in search, but assuming we don't know what we want is not at all the conclusion I draw from using search engines.

Using an LLM isn’t the worst way to rank, but it’s pretty darn slow. The speed could be improved a lot by just distilling into deep neural nets though.

The results for me were fairly high quality and moderately relevant but I think they could be improved as well.

You get pretty far by just blocking low quality blogspam and Medium, which would be a lot faster and could even be done on the frontend with a chrome plugin.

I mean, it's not just search that assumes we don't know what we want. A huge amount of technology these days has shifted to telling us what to want rather than letting us obtain what we have independently decided we want.

Isn't it super expensive to run an LLM on each result?

So there's a cross encoder of some kind which accepts a prompt for how to score?

kagi vs matterrank anyone?

Give me a way to filter out results with ads on them please.

Edit (hn doesn’t let me post this fast): is finding places to buy shit really an issue? How many times in your life have you thought “damn I know what I want to buy, I just don’t know from which site to buy it”? That’s hard to imagine of anyone. This user story just seems like a problem made up by search indexes to court capital.

Edit2: Kagi is great. I'm a full subscriber.

The last thing I want is a search engine where I have to create an account to use it.

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Was the home page vibe coded? The "Take me to Tutorial" button does nothing.