Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, funny you should mention that. One of my techs is on a job site and just called in requesting documentation for an older Avaya phone system. Googling for it was a complete waste of time. (Unfortunately, DDG couldn't fare much better.)

I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this (http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results.

(Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.)

Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.

This makes me wonder if Google makes the internet susceptible to losing rare data. It's possible that the only solution to your OpenSolaris error 16 existed in a web forum that existed until only recently. If Google didn't exist (and people couldn't find the answer), it's plausible that more questions/answers on this topic would have existed.

Then again, you could always create a new post on your problem in the hopes of attracting the attention of someone who solved your problem, but I still wonder if Google unintentionally promotes knowledge-scarcity.

I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search.

I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?

Google tried this. It was called SearchWiki.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

Or was called SearchWiki. It turned out that nobody liked or used it, so it was removed.

I liked the small satisfaction I got from 'X'-ing out spammy sites!

I believe it only had an effect on your personal view of Google. Otherwise, it would have been abused by competitors and 'SEO experts'.

I would've used that more if X-ing them out kept them out! Afaict, it only removed them from that particular search, and if you searched again, they'd show up again.

Then the spammers would use bots or cheap Chinese labor to downvote their competitors. It would just move the problem down a level. For this sort of thing to work, the curators must be trusted, which is expensive.

Such an engine might be worthwhile to a small subset of users, though.

blekko lets you slash out individual sites from the search results. The exclusion just applies to you so spammers can't downvote reasonable sites. Has been popular to eliminate ehow.com from results. ehow isn't enough over the line for us to ban from the crawl entirely, but a lot of people don't ever want to see them in their results.

we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.

Do you have a predefined list of 'These are SEO sites which add no real value' sites which I can include by default?

That's a good idea, thanks. We'll add something along those lines...

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