
Ask HN: Which search engines do you use to do exhaustive research on the web? - person2718
I have to do extensive research on a number of potential variations of a product that I want to build and market. I will have to be searching for physical products, companies, research papers and news publications that refer to those things.<p>With the Google Search service being so dissapointingly degraded and returning so much noise and limited results it&#x27;s almost impossible to try and dig in all that garbage it returns without losing your sanity.<p>Scholar still works well enough, so searching for papers won&#x27;t be that hard, but I really need some advice from people who do this often (patent office workers? Market researchers? Inventors and entrepreneurs?) because this difficulty to discover new information relevant to a subject is making my life very difficult.
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contingencies
For general technical and commercial background of the area I would recommend
Library Genesis with a wide range of related search terms, including to be
exhaustive those in other major languages. You can seed the search query set
from relevant Wikipedia topics, book publishing information page listed
keywords, dewey decimal categories, or other mature collaborative semantic
databases. Using these established semantic databases helps to ensure you
don't miss category specific jargon thus undermining your results.

However, arguably the most important element of hardware products from a
research perspective is the marketplace state with respect to competition and
demand patterns. For this area, I recommend: (1)
[https://patents.google.com/](https://patents.google.com/) (relevant results
of which can also be used to seed/re-seed keywords for the above). The amount
of information people put in patents is ridiculous, you can shortcut a lot of
wasted effort by learning from their mistakes. (2) Existing consumer product
databases such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. (3) Searching Taobao in Chinese for
both the product category (machine translate adequate) and the major
functional components. This reveals a true state of costs and supply chain
outside of any tightly held specialist manufacturing lines, which is often
deeply informative with respect to product design decisions and explaining
marketplace state. (4) Researching specific competitors: funding, timeline,
team, location, announced marketing and business strategy. Job ads will also
give you huge insight in to their skill gaps and technical stack / strategy.
(5) Using google trends to identify search volume changes over time within
your target market(s).

Hope that helps.

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kirubakaran
I'm working on this! [https://histre.com/](https://histre.com/)

Histre aims to help with the whole "knowledge funnel", if you will. My
approach for the web search part of it is to heavily penalize (to varying
degrees) websites with ads, tracking, referral links etc.

The web search part isn't done yet. You don't have an email address in your HN
profile. So if you'd either drop me an email or signup to Histre, I'll let you
know when this is ready.

An additional note re Histre: I find that all the knowledge base apps out
there are "write only". Search sucks in all of them. What's the point of
creating and maintaining KBs if you can't use it later? So I'm solving search
first. Another way Histre stands out (I believe) is that, it strives to solve
the upkeep problem, by making it trivial to keep your knowledge bases up to
date.

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caleb-allen
Google Scholar mostly.

Sometimes I'll find myself using search from a publisher or library when
seeking specific physical document.

That said, I've had the desire for a more robust document search engine many
times. A bit ironic..

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vstuart
searx?
[https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html](https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html)

I've been using it for a couple of weeks and I am quite happy with it.

Per your comments, I think anything that does a metasearch (not relying on a
single search engine -- Google ...) [Dogpile? ...] will offer benefits.

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touristtam
That's actually very interesting. Thanks for sharing. :)

~a ddg user

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twofold
[https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

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textread
Search Hacker News: [https://hn.algolia.com/](https://hn.algolia.com/)

