Comment by swsieber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swsieber | Hacker News Reader

I'd love a search engine that doesn't search content, but instead (edit: primarily) searches for characteristics. For example

- origination date of the website

- number of theme changes

- whether ads are present

- estimated data usage / load time

- general website size

- type of website - personal, company, etc.

- last update time

- presence of javascript

- browser compatibility (well, feature usage detection & browser compatibility inference from that).

Mostly this is just me missing the websites of the early 2000's, and trying to figure out a way to rediscover them.

And I'd probably want content on top of this. (Edit: e.g. search by topics)

Lastly, it'd be nice to restrict things to sub-genres, but I'm not sure. E.g. when I'm doing a search I'd love to reference things related to micro-controllers, and so maybe I'd put in Arduino to get into the realm. Sort of what like google does for you without telling you. (tailoring your searches by some magic context).

A man can dream...

Edit 2: Search engines these days seem to be answer engines, I want a research engine.

> Mostly this is just me missing the websites of the early 2000's, and trying to figure out a way to rediscover them.

Apparently somethingawful and ebaumsworld are still around in some form, and Slashdot of course. The thing is, these sites have largely been replaced by better versions of themselves. That’s resulted in a lot of centralization into a few sites like reddit, which is a combination aggregator and blogging platform for people who are too embarrassed to attach their real name to what they write, which is apparently a good share of the population. Then there are sites like YouTube, LiveLeak, Facebook, that just offer something that no one could or did in the 2000s. And with mobile and apps, there’s a level of engagement that doesn’t leave much room for a thousand little sites with quirky, regular, custom content.

I'm not talking about the large sites though, I'm talking about the small sites. Perhas I should have said feel, and not sites, of the early 2000's.

Right now Google thinks it knows what you want and when you search for things, it returns the same few sites (mostly). You used to come across people's personal sites into which they poured their soul. And while those exist less frequently now, I bet they still exist.

I'd like to be able to search for sites that return a 406 containing a specific string so that I could find APIs that implement particular media type standards.

You mean a search engine which would search content and search for characteristics and show results based on your preferences or am I misreading this?

I think that's a correct reading. Basically, take all of Google hidden stuff and make it explicit, along with adding all the other options I listed.

I think of it as a form (as opposed to content) first search engine, less for precise searching and more for general topic exploring.

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