That seems extremely unlikely as the reason.
It's far more likely that some executives looked at the numbers and decided that removing search operators would make people more likely to click on ads, while leaving them in would make people click on the actual results that they were searching for.
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.
I find I do it quite a lot. When I was researching solar. When I needed some actuators recently. Now I'm looking for a trailer. And so on.
Obviously not groceries, but whenever um investigating something new I find commercial sites to be very helpful.
I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?
If you mean pop-ups, MatterRank can't handle that at the moment because it evaluates markdown content, but it's something we're looking at adding. In the meantime, I'd recommend a good ad-blocker.
Use Brave Search with Goggles (https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover). It's great.
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.
MatterRank uses LLMs to rank pages based on criteria you provide it with, not SEO tricks. It’s not meant to replace Google, but helps when you're looking for something specific and don't want to wade through tons of results that you don't care about. Still early, but useful for deeper searches.
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.
For the former, I'm intrigued but unconvinced that it's what I actually want in a search engine.
For the latter, I imagine that's something that this search engine will need to contend with, although it could "just" be an LLM compute trade-off, where if you give enough results to an LLM to analyse you'll eventually find the good stuff. That said, SEO is going to rapidly become LLMEO and ruin the day again.
I'm hoping that as LLMs become more mainstream more functionality is built into tech that doesn't treat consumers as idiots. This is one stab at it, but there's so many other opportunities imo.
I think where MatterRank shines right now is for finding results where you wouldn't mind waiting an extra 20-30 seconds for an added layer of vetting, as opposed to just wanting a quick answer.
Having said that, we are definitely working on making it faster and more useful for everyday queries.
I've not used it, but anecdotally, I can refine my own search query to get what I want, or conclude it doesn't exist, within 20-30s. Assuming ~5s per search to write, search, read, decide, that's 4-6 searches.
Do you think you're getting more value than 4 iterations on the initial search term? Are you always getting it in one search, or do you end up still needing to refine the search term, extending it beyond that 20-30s?
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.
As for the results, it's tough because we've made the deliberate decision to have no control over the reranking. What that means is that if your criteria is "written by a woman", for instance, then any result that meets that will be ranked equally at the top. In all engines I've built for myself, I have a relevance criteria that's weighted relative to how much I care that the result is exactly what I'm looking for. It's probably important to make that clearer to the end user.
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.
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.
It doesn't even explain why it's better than Perplexity.
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?
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.
