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I don't want a search engine removing whatever they deem a "conspiracy theory" or "misinformation". I can decide on my own.



> I can decide on my own

What tests have you done to confirm that you're actually any good at this?

Or is the idea that you'd actively prefer to have your life ruined by misinformation than admit you might not have the best ability to distinguish - like the way some people would prefer to be crippled or maimed than accept safety protection on dangerous machinery because they find it emasculating?


>What tests have you done to confirm that you're actually any good at this?

That's where the "decide on my own" part comes from. I don't need to pass your tests or arbitrary criteria.

The most important point in having a democracy and citizens worthy of the name, is that you don't delegate this sorting out the wheat from the chaff to some third party that "knows better".


What makes you think a multinational corporation would be any better? They are at the mercy of regulators and will always bow to political pressure rather than the truth.


> What tests have you done to confirm that you're actually any good at this?

I can figure it out. I don't need to get information filtered by people who think they know what is best for everyone (else). This is what China does.


Most likely, if you're posting on HN, you're probably at least OK at critical thinking


Isn't that essentially saying you don't want your search engine ranking by relevance and quality?


Quality, the same "AI" recommends me irrelevant videos, cant recognise me as a human if i log in from any browser other than chrome, and that issues takedowns randomly for users. The ine that spams, pinterest like shit site quality on front page. Yeah, no, I dont want it to decide.


The first thing I do when searching for images is `-site:pinterest.com` The quality of results increases immensely.


IIRC Google used to have a dropdown in the search results similar to "Don't show results from this site". Luckily I don't see Yahoo Answers results anymore but would be nice to have Pinterest removed.


If you use Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey, etc. you might want to check out 'Google hit Hider by domain'[0] [in spite of the name, it works on several search engines, not just Google]. It provides a really simple interface to ban [with various levels of extreme prejudice] sites from ever again appearing in your search results.

[0] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-d...


This looks great, thank you!


No, it's like saying I want the search engine ranking by relevance and quality of search terms and matches.

If I search "we never landed on the moon" I want to see results about those theories, not see them censored because the search engine "knows better".


These days big tech seems to be focused on hiding certain information from users, herding them into a certain echo-chamber.

No thanks, I'd rather think for myself.


Relevance and quality are subjective.


Of course they are. That's the reason Google "won" in the first place after all. They had a algorithm which better fit what people expected.


But tides are turning, Google's results are steadily going downhill. Unfortunately it seems to be too much of a daunting task with today's size of the internet to jump in with a viable competitor.


> But tides are turning, Google's results are steadily going downhill. Unfortunately it seems to be too much of a daunting task with today's size of the internet to jump in with a viable competitor.

I wonder what portion of the internet you have to scrape to be able to have good results for 90% of queries. An enormous number of my queries end up on Wikipedia somewhere, for example. A lot end up on Stack Overflow. The two of those probably constitute the majority of my searches, and almost certainly a majority of the searches where I really care about the answer (and I'm not just googling whether pirates and ninjas were contemporaries of each other, because why not).

If Google's results are really slipping that much, you can make up for the lack of data by providing better results on the data you do have.

I am curious why something like that hasn't gotten more popular. A search engine that only indexes highly reputable and public sources would be interesting. Wikipedia, dictionaries from somewhere, reputable newspapers globally, etc. Is it just too big of a target for abuse to be viable?


Good points.

> I wonder what portion of the internet you have to scrape to be able to have good results for 90% of queries.

But this is it. I don't think it'd be too hard to get 90% of queries right. It's the 10% that are the challenge.

"Page rank" / "link juice" (amount/strength of incoming links) is still a main ingredient in Google's recipe, so they are actually able to determine, without manual intervention (more or less), which sites are "reputable", while your suggestion would require someone to curate the assortments of "reputable" sites.

How would you discover niche blogs? Or even more high profile ones, just not known to the major public?

That said, as you say, you could probably do with something like this for most of your day-to-day searches, and then just !g or whatever for the rest.


What criteria should be used to rank search results?


Search engine should give access and filtering to all metadata so you can narrow your search as you want.


Ok, but a search engine has to sort by SOMETHING


Right, but sorting results isn't the same as removing a subset entirely.


Putting something last on a search result of thousands is basically the same as removing it entirely. Hell, even putting it on the second page is basically equivalent to not returning it at all.




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