I'd drop any references to reddit - they are far from the only site with upvotes and downvotes, and while they have a rabid fan base, they also have a rabid detractor base. Better to just state your value props than to deliberately inherit the baggage from a contentious site.
Dude. Not a good response. Better to say "good point, thanks for the tip" since you're the one who suffers the bottom line - either you're understood or you aren't.
I think the indexing needs some work. For the query "Kozai", Google, DDG, and Bing all return Wikipedia's page on the Kozai mechanism as either the top result or the second result. The lone result I get from Jive is a link to what appears to be a Japanese porn site. I can't even upvote the Wikipedia page because it doesn't show up.
We need more links indexed. The crawler that I wrote is pretty slow and right now we don't have a lot of documents indexed. I will be replacing the crawler I wrote with a faster one soon. Until then I have been using !bangs.
I've considered that but didn't really know anything about the organization and how long they'll be around. We're gonna give Colly a try: https://github.com/gocolly/colly.
I really like the idea. However, let's think about abuse patterns: what prevents CEO agency from creating 1k t2.micro instances and clicking upvote for a link of interest and downvote all the competitors?
The local mom and pop shop aren’t going to be able to compete with Walmart. This only works if both entities have similar technical and financial status.
My reputation? None, really. My background is in finance and I'm a self-taught developer. Just tired of not having anything I like. If you don't trust me you can run it on your own server.
Neat idea, scary to implement though. As everyone mentions, manipulation is a massive concern.
With that said, perhaps peer-promoted links would solve this issue. If you built a network of peers (my brother, his friend, his friends friend) and modulated upvoted by their abstraction to me, it could make for a nice up voting system.
Anyone know if that style of voting has been implemented by anyone? Does it suffer fatal flaws? Sounds difficult to implement, for starters.
The rate limit applies to everyone equally so you can write a bot to upvote all your links but someone can then write a bot to downvote them. The default scoring system is meant to be overwritten and can help weed out the bot attempts: https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/....
Reddit has tons of manipulation by users yet relevancy seems to be very good there.
So did (and still do) a lot of political discussions on Reddit. Then we find out that they're heavily being manipulated by Russia. Those people thought those posts were organically, communally upvoted and vetted. Turns out, they were manipulated heavily.
Any heavily manipulated system could have organic and true content for some people. I think the goal would be to have trust in the platform. Reddit, as of late, has no trust with anything of meaning. It has been shown to be manipulated by companies and governments.
I could hire a firm to push my content in your favorite subreddits.. so I struggle to see how Reddit is remotely a good platform for non-manipulated discovering content.
Many people don't like that Google can alter their searches, providing bad incentives. A Reddit-like search now opens up the ability to manipulate your searches to ad agencies, governments, bad actors, etc.
What's the alternative? As others have pointed out the results as they stand aren't that good and, as you point out, other search engines have their own incentives to push stuff to the top.
Since the scoring system can be customized I think we can eventually figure out a way to deal with bots but it will always be done in a way that has to treat all domains equally. I think it would be appropriate to have our scoring system regularly audited (along with the rest of the code) to ensure that we treat all domains equally and that no modifications are being made to the rest of the code in regards to privacy.
If, after all of that, you aren't satisfied then by all means you can run your own instance and order the results as you see fit while blocking others from upvoting/downvoting.
EDIT: BTW, I am not suggesting that the voting system is set in stone. If there is a better way then I'd love to hear it! I do understand the drawbacks to the users voting and I hope I am not coming across as being completely inflexible on this point. I just haven't come up with a better alternative and haven't gotten much in terms of concrete suggestions.
> What's the alternative? As others have pointed out the results as they stand aren't that good and, as you point out, other search engines have their own incentives to push stuff to the top.
That's the million dollar question isn't it? If I had an answer, I'd have a product ;)
That doesn't change the fact though that I don't trust Reddit any further than I can throw it. It's fun for memes, but beyond that it's been proven to having been manipulated multiple times now.
> Since the scoring system can be customized I think we can eventually figure out a way to deal with bots but it will always be done in a way that has to treat all domains equally. I think it would be appropriate to have our scoring system regularly audited (along with the rest of the code) to ensure that we treat all domains equally and that no modifications are being made to the rest of the code in regards to privacy.
Yea, I hope. I'm not trying to knock your product at all btw. If you read my first comment, I even said I love the idea of a voting based search, but I just can't trust the public to do the voting. If it was based on a peer network (brothers friend, brother's friend's friend, etc), maybe that would be better. Obviously though there are challenges with that sort of method, I'm not saying it's perfect or even good - it was just an idea after 30s of thinking haha.
> EDIT: BTW, I am not suggesting that the voting system is set in stone. If there is a better way then I'd love to hear it! I do understand the drawbacks to the users voting and I hope I am not coming across as being completely inflexible on this point. I just haven't come up with a better alternative and haven't gotten much in terms of concrete suggestions.
You haven't gotten concrete suggestions because I think no one knows the answer. Information manipulation is, in my opinion, the biggest problem facing humanity right now. Literally. So it's no surprised that our ideas to prevent manipulation at scale are lacking.
"that doesn't track you" ... a word to the people with business degrees that larp as programmers on here. In order to track you it would need additional work, this just means there was no tracking ADDED. This is not a feature by any measure.
Well, if there are no other votes for a given query then an upvoted link will go to the top. Once it's there then that link is now more visible to others who can either agree or disagree.
EDIT: Like I've pointed out in other comments the default scoring system can be customized and that behavior could be changed.
I tried four searches. 'smbc', 'xkcd', 'reddit', and 'google'. None returned what you'd expect. The search for 'google' was especially weird. I'm surprised to see a search engine that can't find the most visited page on the internet.
This is an excellent idea. I'm assuming HN is getting an early preview, but if not I would definitely put a one liner on the landing page that explains what it does a bit.
I do think in the future you should market it with the two differentiators more separate. "Show HN: A Reddit-style search engine where users upvote and downvotes links. It also doesn't track you!"
Yeah, that's what I meant...wish I could edit the title.
EDIT: I'm not going to edit the landing page as not all users know what reddit is. The HN community knows reddit but post title could clearly be better.
FWIW, I just spent a minute on the Github page (a normal amount of time for something like this) and had no idea anyone could upvote and downvote links until I read the GP comment. In fact, I just searched the Github page for "reddit" and for "vote", and found nothing.
I don't know what this product is or does. Does it run locally? Is there a hosted version available? How is it different than DuckDuckGo or Startpage? Is there a voting feature, as the GP says?
A voting feature would make it interesting to me with one major caveat: It depends on who is doing the voting. For example, if I could restrict voting to HN users then it could be a very useful way to search for tech or for many intellectual topics but not for housing in Tokyo. A random subset of the general public's votes on tech topics would not be useful to me as a professional. Political topics seem like a minefield.
This is different than DDG/Startpage, etc in that everything is open source. I think I have a good start on the instant answers: "shaquille o'neal height", "weather", "matisyahu discography", etc. To my knowledge neither has Wikidata instant answers.
Somehow similar to Searx[1], except that Jive even has its own crawler, whereas Searx really just is a metasearch engine.
I haven't tried setting up an instance myself, but it appears to be quite simple.
One thing: I found it a bit unclear what the voting does.
Thanks for sharing this. We need more truly free search engines, and not just non-free ones trying to appear "open source friendly", like DuckDuckGo[2].
The idea is solid, but I think you need to do some of domain weighting until you get users. For example, I tried searching "League of Legends", and I got nothing but a whole page of links to various hacking websites and gold sellers (which makes no sense in the context of the game), all of them at zero votes. This is pretty discouraging, and I don't think it makes much sense to make the first 10 or 20 people to search for a topic sort through (and vote on) the entire Internet worth of keyword related links until things are in some semblance of order.
The whole design of 51% percent of users downvoting an entry and sending it to oblivion is NOT a design pattern we should be proliferating in the industry.
Not sure how upvoting will make search better. Most of the search happens in a specific context, where users are just desperate to go to the desired result and not come back and vote on stuffs if it is relevant. Plus, even if it is done there is no way to know if the page is still relevant since the upvoting.
67 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadEdit: typo
When I see "Reddit-style search...", I immediately think of search that doesn't work.
EDIT: To clarify - I've just referenced Reddit in this post. I don't plan to use it anywhere else.
I would suggest rewording the tagline to "Privacy respecting search engine with reddit style voting".
Seems like an interesting idea - could be quite useful if you can get a critical mass of user data.
It's cool to see some new things happening in the search engine world.
No results for 0xbitcoin
Suggestions:
Learn how to spell. Try something else.
EDIT: The scoring function can also be customized. https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch/blob/master/search/...
With that said, perhaps peer-promoted links would solve this issue. If you built a network of peers (my brother, his friend, his friends friend) and modulated upvoted by their abstraction to me, it could make for a nice up voting system.
Anyone know if that style of voting has been implemented by anyone? Does it suffer fatal flaws? Sounds difficult to implement, for starters.
Reddit has tons of manipulation by users yet relevancy seems to be very good there.
Any heavily manipulated system could have organic and true content for some people. I think the goal would be to have trust in the platform. Reddit, as of late, has no trust with anything of meaning. It has been shown to be manipulated by companies and governments.
I could hire a firm to push my content in your favorite subreddits.. so I struggle to see how Reddit is remotely a good platform for non-manipulated discovering content.
Many people don't like that Google can alter their searches, providing bad incentives. A Reddit-like search now opens up the ability to manipulate your searches to ad agencies, governments, bad actors, etc.
Since the scoring system can be customized I think we can eventually figure out a way to deal with bots but it will always be done in a way that has to treat all domains equally. I think it would be appropriate to have our scoring system regularly audited (along with the rest of the code) to ensure that we treat all domains equally and that no modifications are being made to the rest of the code in regards to privacy.
If, after all of that, you aren't satisfied then by all means you can run your own instance and order the results as you see fit while blocking others from upvoting/downvoting.
EDIT: BTW, I am not suggesting that the voting system is set in stone. If there is a better way then I'd love to hear it! I do understand the drawbacks to the users voting and I hope I am not coming across as being completely inflexible on this point. I just haven't come up with a better alternative and haven't gotten much in terms of concrete suggestions.
That's the million dollar question isn't it? If I had an answer, I'd have a product ;)
That doesn't change the fact though that I don't trust Reddit any further than I can throw it. It's fun for memes, but beyond that it's been proven to having been manipulated multiple times now.
> Since the scoring system can be customized I think we can eventually figure out a way to deal with bots but it will always be done in a way that has to treat all domains equally. I think it would be appropriate to have our scoring system regularly audited (along with the rest of the code) to ensure that we treat all domains equally and that no modifications are being made to the rest of the code in regards to privacy.
Yea, I hope. I'm not trying to knock your product at all btw. If you read my first comment, I even said I love the idea of a voting based search, but I just can't trust the public to do the voting. If it was based on a peer network (brothers friend, brother's friend's friend, etc), maybe that would be better. Obviously though there are challenges with that sort of method, I'm not saying it's perfect or even good - it was just an idea after 30s of thinking haha.
> EDIT: BTW, I am not suggesting that the voting system is set in stone. If there is a better way then I'd love to hear it! I do understand the drawbacks to the users voting and I hope I am not coming across as being completely inflexible on this point. I just haven't come up with a better alternative and haven't gotten much in terms of concrete suggestions.
You haven't gotten concrete suggestions because I think no one knows the answer. Information manipulation is, in my opinion, the biggest problem facing humanity right now. Literally. So it's no surprised that our ideas to prevent manipulation at scale are lacking.
seems like a neat idea I'd love to see proven out, keep it up!
Cool idea to mash up though. Have you calculated how many people need to actively vote on stuff for the good results to actually get to the top?
EDIT: Like I've pointed out in other comments the default scoring system can be customized and that behavior could be changed.
I do think in the future you should market it with the two differentiators more separate. "Show HN: A Reddit-style search engine where users upvote and downvotes links. It also doesn't track you!"
IMO thats a better product position.
EDIT: I'm not going to edit the landing page as not all users know what reddit is. The HN community knows reddit but post title could clearly be better.
I don't know what this product is or does. Does it run locally? Is there a hosted version available? How is it different than DuckDuckGo or Startpage? Is there a voting feature, as the GP says?
A voting feature would make it interesting to me with one major caveat: It depends on who is doing the voting. For example, if I could restrict voting to HN users then it could be a very useful way to search for tech or for many intellectual topics but not for housing in Tokyo. A random subset of the general public's votes on tech topics would not be useful to me as a professional. Political topics seem like a minefield.
This is different than DDG/Startpage, etc in that everything is open source. I think I have a good start on the instant answers: "shaquille o'neal height", "weather", "matisyahu discography", etc. To my knowledge neither has Wikidata instant answers.
hn@ycombinator.com
(Submitted title was "Show HN: A Reddit-style search engine that doesn't track you".)
Somehow similar to Searx[1], except that Jive even has its own crawler, whereas Searx really just is a metasearch engine.
I haven't tried setting up an instance myself, but it appears to be quite simple.
One thing: I found it a bit unclear what the voting does.
Thanks for sharing this. We need more truly free search engines, and not just non-free ones trying to appear "open source friendly", like DuckDuckGo[2].
[1]: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/ [2]: https://duck.co/help/open-source/opensource-overview
You will need Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL as well as run the Wikipedia & MusicBrainz dumps. Let me know if you run into any issues.