
Searching without PageRank - greglindahl
http://blog.blekko.com/2012/05/09/searching-without-pagerank-2
======
DanielBMarkham
This reminds me of an aggregation site idea I had a couple of years ago:
something similar to HN or Reddit, but with blocks up for all the most popular
sites. That way trend voting wouldn't be such a problem. Once a site or an
author got popular enough, they "graduated" and would no longer be available.

I still think there is a lot of merit to this idea. Too many things are
decided simply on the momentum of popularity instead of actual value to the
consumer.

~~~
greglindahl
Ooo, I like it.

------
guimarin
I found searching minus the top 10k websites to be most effective for finding
new stuff. It seems that after that point, a lot of the 'crap SEO' stuff is
gone. One problem, the sort of baby with the bath water issue, is that the
quality of content also goes down. The search engines still do a great job for
the most part in surfacing relevant content, mostly because the barrier to
entry to 'gaming' them is high enough ( that most people dont' really notice
spam ). I don't know if seaching this way will be an effective strategy for me
going forward, or even if for the most popular categories the spammers start a
new SEO campaign, ( let's optimize these queries for after the top X domains.
), but it was definitely an interesting thought/search experiment. And only in
an hour? impressive.

~~~
greglindahl
I bet there are types of searches for which excluding popular sites works well
-- for example, trying to find less popular stuff, which is something that
popular websites don't do that good of a job of covering. "Indie" topics, if
you will. Would you try to discuss an indie movie on a website chock full of
discussions about the latest blockbuster? Then when you search, don't you want
to look at less popular movie websites to find the good discussion about your
indie movie?

~~~
stcredzero
Already showed up here:

<http://millionshort.com/>

~~~
greglindahl
You're right -- I mention that right at the top of this blog posting as what
inspired me to do this 1 hour hack.

~~~
stcredzero
'doh!

~~~
tripzilch
Aw come on, if HN's UI would be "advanced"[0] enough that it would collapse
low-scoring comments[1], it would actually make sense to downvote this. But
now it just seems petty.

[0] you know, like Reddit.

[1] or if its HTML wouldn't be so horrid to make me give up in despair every
time I think to script myself such a thing (as none of the existing 3rd party
solutions seem to have gone through the trouble of testing on Opera)

------
younata
This isn't searching without pagerank. (As far as I know, blekko uses
pagerank)

It's just telling the search engine to ignore the first X results, which still
relies on the pagerank algorithm.

Searching without pagerank would be similar to using a search engine pre-
google.

~~~
tripzilch
First of, I agree that it's not quite "searching without pagerank".

> It's just telling the search engine to ignore the first X results

Nope, a lot of people seem to be confused about this:

It doesn't drop the first X results, but it removes the top X most popular
websites from its index--the same ones for every query.

That's why this technique works so well, even if you just drop the top 1000
most popular websites, most of these sites you have probably already seen many
times and/or know about. So by dropping them, you're ensured to get results
that are fresh and new.

Of course how well this works for you really depends on what kind of ~seeker
you are. If you're the kind of person that searches Google only to click on
the first Wikipedia link instead of searching Wikipedia straight away
(assuming you got a shortcut for that), these shortslashed searches will turn
out disappointing.

"But before I did the search, I didn't know yet that Wikipedia would be the
most useful result!", some might say. But they probably knew whether they were
looking for a download page, company address or a definition/explanation,
right? In the last case, how often did your top 10 Google results contain a
_useful_ result that was _not_ Wikipedia? Not that often, in my experience.
Usually you get some other links from About.com, Dictionary.com, and some
stores like Apple or Amazon. Usually there's just one obvious correct result
among the 10, or it's just not there and your search is going to be a
frustrating one because tweaking keywords to improve your results has become
impossibly unintuitive with Google's recent "I know what you _really_ mean"
approach.

So that's another thing, as long as you know when you want to head straight
for a tried-and-true reference (wikipedia, dictionary, HN search--I find DDG's
!bang searches useful for these when I don't have them configured as shortcuts
yet), not only does removing the top X sites give you fresh and new results,
_also_ your first page of results will be a varied palette out of the possible
interpretations of your keywords (which you can use to refine), instead of a
unity sausage (aka, a UNOX).

------
nelmaven
My search did bring up some interesting stuff.

------
tinyjoe
and now it's between blekko and the duck

------
iRobot
Loving it, great to be able to exclude annoying sites pay for content sites.
Keep up the good work

