You can make anything short of million users per day ecomm with WordPress, and even that would only take a few hardy engineers willing to put on waders.
I searched for "horror movies" and the first result was a lemmy community that has literally "616 subscribers" "30 Posts" and "76 Comments" which is about as dead as you would expect from a lemmy instance.
I also searched for "league of legends", and it couldn't find its homepage.
I think its ranking algorithm may need improvement.
Edit: also, I'd rather not say this, but do we really need another DuckDuckGo? I don't think Google fails at its job because of financial incentives. I think it might fail at this job simply put because the web of 2024 isn't the web of 1990. For example, the lemmy result, it's a link aggregation about horror movie articles. The search engine could literally do the job of the link aggregator, as it has a SERP that aggregates links, and yet it's aggregating links to link aggregators. Why are the search engines doing this? Because it's 2024. I wish someone tried a new approach at this problem rather than just copying Google's design and saying "it's Google but not yucky".
The reason I'd rather not say it is exactly because I don't want to sound like I'm just coming in here and shitting on things.
I think there are no open source search engines because the instant you realize you have to periodically scrape the trillions of web pages in your index for updates you just give up because there is no way you can afford that without a solid business plan, which is hard to have when you are a search engine with no users, because you have no results, because you can't scrape trillions of webpages to build an index. Hence, I don't think it makes sense to try to make a general-purpose search engine, specially as Google has mastered that art and Google results look like that.
Browsers REALLY have to fix the "read all your data" problem. Even with domain limitations, if you use an extension for a site, that means you use that site a lot, so you probably even have an account on it.
I think extensions should declare a bunch of CSS selectors that they need data access to, and if an element doesn't match those selectors, then all attributes and .innerText/.innerHTML should return undefined.
I don't care if normal people can't understand what CSS selectors are. Just hide it in "view technical details" box or something.
Yeah, if you think of terminal programs like old text adventure games that you have to keep typing stuff until something works, they're literally trying to make GUIs as unintuitive as terminals now.
Just swipe, shake, tap the corners, try scrolling even if there's scroll bar, until it does something!
To open settings, you're supposed to rotate the phone 180 degrees around the vertical axis, and then 180 degrees in the opposite direction. It's so obvious.
>I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category
That is the problem. You do not want a web search engine that gives you a WEB PAGE for your query. You want an answer AI.
Google can not find a page nobody has written, and if several people write about a topic, there is just no way Google can figure out which one should be the first result correctly.
When Google talks about finding relevant results, they just mean if you type "hacker news" on Google the first result will probably be this website instead of news about hackers who hacked a bank or something. That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.
Everything else is just expecting more from Google than it can feasibly provide and then getting angry when it tacks AI on everything because it can't do magic.
As a separate service distinct from web search, sure. But I also want to be able to search the web and get lists of pages.
> That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.
This is what I don't want in a search engine. Unless that search engine figures out a way to read my mind, anyhow, which would bring up a whole host of other issues. Google trying to guess at what I want rather than just giving me a list of pages that match my query is the main problem that I have with Google search.
Again, it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.
It's a SEARCH engine, not a BROWSE CATEGORY engine.
And I get it, I get frustrated at this too. Sometimes I try to search for a category of something, like free image editors, and Google just can't give me an answer I'd like.. And it's really not a hard query to answer. It just lists me a bunch of names with zero info about what platform they are for, or what features they have. It's an useless list. It's simply beyond the scope of what it is made to do.
I mean, seriously, I know Google is a blackbox, but Google is really just a single textbox. We're expecting too much from a single textbox.
> it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.
Not at all, as evidenced by other search engines that are successful at this and the fact that Google used to be successful at this.
> It's a SEARCH engine
Precisely. I want it to search the web and return a list of sites that match my search criteria. I don't want it to to answer a specific question for me, nor to try to guess what I "really" want. That should be done by a different tool.
> We're expecting too much from a single textbox.
I'm not sure what you think that I'm expecting, but what I'm expecting is much simpler than what Google seems to be trying to do.
I suspect that I've failed to adequately explain my use case and we're talking about different things, but I'm not sure where I went wrong so don't know how to clarify.
You are arguing that google is a tool. The other person is arguing that google is more like an opinionated contractor.
"You don't want a tool, you want to remodel your bathroom" is what the other person is arguing. That's kind of true.
We're arguing that we don't want someone tell us how to remodel our bathroom, we just want a tool we can use to remodel our bathroom ourselves.
Google said that providing a tool doesn't make enough money, so they transitioned into being a contractor.
The crux of the issue is the "-" operator. As a tool, it removed any search result with the word after the "-" operator on the page in a very specific way. If you weren't getting the results you wanted, it's because you didn't think of how to use the tool in the right way. As a contractor, they try to interpret what you want to subtract and then give you what they think you want.
The person you are responding to might be too young to remember that google was actually a very good tool at one point.
I wouldn't call it "insane antisocial behavior." I have no idea what his personal life is like, but managing the Linux source code isn't socializing, it's a job. You could say he's not very professional in this job, but he isn't doing this to make friends and get along with everybody.
Pretty much so, yes. It is cheaper to just get some random dude on Fiverr who has no clue about GUI design, but can whip up something pretty that impresses the manager who has no idea about UX and GUI design either.
