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Comment by duncan-donuts | Hacker News Reader

You used to be able to find them deep in search results but now it’s all blogspam. It’d be nice if this stuff was easier to find.

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If you've missed all the HN love for it over the past while, there's a search engine here: https://search.marginalia.nu/ which is trying to achieve just that

Yes you used to be able maybe in mid/late-aughties. This is not something recent.

how about a search engine that ranks higher the less ads there are

I get this metric but at what point is the cutoff? If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements, do they then get deranked on the search engine that led people there?

> If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements

More advertisements? Any advertisements make the site worse. More makes it more worse.

It's so inexpensive to have a website these days, even one that pulls in a substantial number of visitors, that it's hard to make an argument that ads are necessary to pay for hosting.

Oh for sure, just a hypothetical lol. And idk maybe you write software or something that you want to keep as free as you can, so ads make it doable to sustain that. There’s any number of valid reasons to advertise, and if it’s a site for content I support I’ll probably turn of ublock so long as the ads aren’t overwhelming or obstructing

only if there is something with the same info with less ads

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