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jfindleytoday at 12:14 PM1 replyview on HN

Unfortunately the index is the easy part. Transforming user input into a series of tokens which get used to rank possible matches and return the top N, based on likely relevence, is the hard part and I'm afraid this doesn't appear to do an acceptable job with any of the queries I tested.

There's a reason Google became so popular as quickly as it did. It's even harder to compete in this space nowadays, as the volume of junk and SEO spam is many orders of magnitude worse as a percentage of the corpus than it was back then.


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saltysalttoday at 2:42 PM

I am definitely not trying to complete with Google, instead I am offering an old-school "just search" engine with no tracking, personalization filtering, or AI.

It's driven by my own personal nostalgia for the early Internet, and to find interesting hidden corners of the Internet that are becoming increasingly hard to find on Google after you wade through all of the sponsored results and spam in the first few pages...

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