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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Is this kind of promotional post even allowed? It doesn't have any actual content that discusses how technically to make search better, only that MatterRank has solved it. If doing content marketing, remember to include some content.

It doesn't even explain why it's better than Perplexity.

gave it a shot, i like the concept, even though i suspect it'll cost like $2 a query to really get somewhere.

anyway, my test was to search for FOSS software, explicitly asking for "not big tech" and no ads. the contents of the results were fine, if repetitive - but i was a bit sad to see a lot of youtube and reddit in the results. does the " algorithm" not look at the actual domains?

Modern search engines are yet another case of the tech world refusing to learn from other domains and dragging down everyone's quality of life as a result. People have been searching and organizing information long before computers. There is an entire field called library science.

Why is everyone so fixated on keywords for instance? They have their uses, but librarians and people who do research for a living also use subject headings. These are still human designated as far as I know.

People who are experts in an area often search directly by author. An actually useful tool would be something that cross-references advisor-advisee relationships, who was colleagues with who as a function of time, etc, and finds additional sources based on author networks. You maybe could do something like this for the web too, as I suspect a lot of high quality pages made by individuals are related by such interpersonal networks. A lot of spammy garbage sites probably have network relations to each other as well.

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

kagi vs matterrank anyone?

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

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

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.

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