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Comment by curiousllama | Hacker News Reader

Good idea. You could start with fitness. Lots of high-quality information out there that’s entirely, 100% inaccessible via google.

Over COVID, I did the whole fitness thing from a few different angles (overhauled diet, trained for a marathon, now lifting weights a lot). I found I could only find good info by going directly to a trusted source - literally, typing http://www. like I’m in the 90s or something. This is the exact issue a search engine should solve, but Google doesn’t.

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Is your trusted source the same as my trusted source which is the same as my neighbor’s trusted source which is the same as my Australian cousin’s trusted source?

If not, at least one of us is going to hate this new search engine.

This is a problem I'm working on.

What sorts of unique things did you do that Google failed at? Maybe you read through discussion sites or got tips from books or something like that

Social media and trial and error. I knew a bit, and asked some friends for advice. I used that to find people who said stuff I thought made sense on Quora, Tik Tok, and Instagram (ie they agreed with what I knew to be true and false, so I could assume the other stuff they said was likely to be true as well). I tried what they said, found what worked, and went all in when I saw results.

Importantly, this was bottom up: it was largely recommendation engines suggesting people I then filtered through for what I wanted (running, bodybuilding) vs didn’t (traditional weight loss). I couldn’t specify what I wanted, or it would be garbage SEO spam.

That's a new angle to me. I rely on pseudonymous content like Reddit and HN. It does make sense to look for people or groups focused on a larger topic like fitness.