Hacker News Reader

chris_fon NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Price List

The file says "Confidential Proprietary Information" just above the price list. What does that mean in this context? They are making it publically available on their website, and one of the intents of the new bill was to make this information machine readable so developers could build upon it.

chris_fon Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

This is cool. Are all of the entries manually added, or are you also pulling in information from outside structured sources like Wikipedia?

chris_fon How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

I would say that may be true for the average HN reader, but in my experience definitely not true for the average overall user.

Based on the linked study [0], 57% of people can't tell the difference between a Google ad and an organic search result.

[0] https://varn.co.uk/01/18/varn-original-research-almost-60-pe...

chris_fon How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

Interestingly enough, I just went to 'Google' that question [0] and got some very non-relevant info boxes:

https://imgur.com/a/J9U5ZwJ

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[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ad+revenue

chris_fon How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

The estimated average Google search ad cost-per-click (CPC) is $2.69 [0].

Working on the conservative assumptions that an average person will run 10 searches a day and click on 1 search ad a day, Google will make $83.39 a month from the average user. It is likely much more though.

[0] https://valveandmeter.com/pay-per-click-statistics/

chris_fon How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

We will respect your search query at Runnaroo if you use quotes. Google also has a verbatim search filter, which does a decent job most of the time.

chris_fon How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into the digital abyss

At the time, HotBot was my other go-to search engine. Interesting to see that it is still around, but is now a VPN company.

chris_fon Show HN: Devbook – Search Engine for Developers

> We actually use Google's Search API under the hood. It might be possible that Google is giving you different results in a browser based on your search history.

Cool project!

Just a heads up, the Google search API provides different results than the normal Google web search. [0] It uses a different index that isn't as big, and handles term matching a little differently. There will be a personalization element for different results, but there are a lot of results that Google just won't be return through the search API.

I also work a lot with the google API for Runnaroo [1] (and the Github and Stack Overflow APIs).

[0] https://support.google.com/programmable-search/answer/70392?...

[1] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+unique+list+valu...

chris_fon Ask HN: Why is Chrome a better browser than Firefox?

I guess that's what I'm wondering. Is there something that I make missing?

FF has lost so much ground to Chrome. Does it just come down to Google having significantly better distribution channels vs. a "better" product?

chris_fon Full text search on 400M US court cases

Congratulations on the launch. I have worked in open source and public record research for the last 15 years, and your coverage is extremely impressive.

Do you have any long term plan for the site? I can see this going in a lot of different directions depending on your goals.

chris_fon We can do better than DuckDuckGo

> For example this is the #2 result for "python f strings" on DDG[1]. It's total garbage, and, quoting the blog, "we can do better". (This result is also on page 1 for the same query on Google.)

There are other options that may be better, but in general, very few people are looking for them.

Here's your "python f strings" query on Runnaroo:

https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python+f+strings

I'm the creator of Runnaroo.

chris_fon We can do better than DuckDuckGo

> Yeah, all of these are quite DDG-friendly searches...

This is exactly correct. Excluding poor local search results (which is understandable bc of the privacy aspect), Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance (5+ word queries), and also finding results from small or obscure sites. The later is simply because Bing's organic index is not as large as Googles.

Bing/DDG's organic results are still very good, but they are not as good as Google's in the above specific circumstances.

chris_fon Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)

>Are in some way robots.txt and those Cloudflare measures anticompetitive?

Article by Matt Wells from Gigablast on Cloudflare. Gigablast has one of the largest independent search indexes.

https://www.gigablast.com/blog.html

chris_fon Apple building search engine to take on Google, report claims

This almost seems like a PG submarine [0] article. Especially now, it would benefit Google to be able to point to viable competitors. Maybe I am being too skeptical though.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

chris_fon Best of the Modern Web: Darebee

There is a lot of nostalgia on HN regarding how great the web used to be before everything was commercialized.

I came across this site today, and wanted to post it as a reminder that there are still great sites out there to discover that are modern and full of excellent content.

There are no <blink> tags or under construction gifs, but when I was exploring it I had similar feelings to when I first got on the web in the late 90s.

chris_fon Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet

Sorry, you're right I misread your comment. I was referring to the section about respecting the terms you want to be searched.

I know Swisscows and Carrot2 both do some topic clustering, maybe those would be interesting as well.

chris_fon Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet

Yes, Google is the source for organic web page results (similar to how DDG uses Bing). There are currently about 60 other sources for the vertical specific results.

chris_fon Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet

>If DDG simply implemented that single feature, I would never go back to Google.

Here you go. #2 on the list.

https://www.runnaroo.com/blog/the-search-engine-hacker-news-...

chris_fon 'Zoom towns' are exploding in the West

Would have liked to seen the article list more of the specific towns. Just searched around and found this article [0], but only a few western towns were mentioned and most of the places listed are quite expensive.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/2020/09/15/zoom-tow...

chris_fon Show HN: TidalWaves API – live, tokenized news metadata from around the world

The one nice thing about GDELT is it translates non-english language news so that you can use an english search term and see articles in different language. It's not perfect (i.e. machine translation), but I am not aware of any other service that provides similar functionality.

More info: https://blog.gdeltproject.org/gdelt-translingual-translating...

(unrelated: scrolling on that page is horrible)

chris_fon Show HN: TidalWaves API – live, tokenized news metadata from around the world

I've used trigram matching of article title strings with some success for comparing similarity of news article. If the strings are greater than .6 they are probably about the same topic.

chris_fon Versus – Find alternatives to a product or service

> If you don't mind me asking, is the money through the 'promoted' sections sustainable enough for a search engine?

Sustainable to cover the cost of the service? Absolutely, it will do that, but it is not scalable that it would support the needed revenue to be the next Google (or even DDG for that matter).

Committing to privacy and user-center features eliminates a lot of scalable monetization strategies, and I am completely OK with that. I started and continue to work on Runnaroo because I love trying to solve the problem of building a better alternative search engine option.

Also, thank you for the kind words!

chris_fon Versus – Find alternatives to a product or service

A cool feature update would be to map the multiple layers of related suggestions on a force-directed graph.

chris_fon Versus – Find alternatives to a product or service

That's pretty good.

For another option, you can also use the 'related:' on Runnaroo - https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=related%3Achrome

Results sourced from SaaSHub.

chris_fon What the Search Engines Looked Like About 20 Years Ago

It's interesting that every site had directory/portal home pages until Google. Now most search engine mimics Google's minimal search home page with little more than a search bar.

I wonder if things will ever come back around to having directory on the home page?

chris_fon Show HN: SplitSearch – Simultaneously search conservative and liberal news orgs

Here is a Google Custom Search Engine based on MBFC: https://factualsearch.news/

chris_fon Show HN: SplitSearch – Simultaneously search conservative and liberal news orgs

Yeah, the MBFC site isn't as 'polished' as AllSides, but they have a lot more sites covered and overall I think their rankings are better (I know that is very subjective though).

chris_fon Google is giving data to police based on search keywords, court docs show

> DDG doesn't record search information in the first place.

That's not entirely true. DDG saves user searches. They don't save identifying information (IP, UA, etc.) along with the user search.

The below is directly from their privacy policy [0]:

"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

chris_fon DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

A trick I use to identify the source of unknown search results is to compare the SERP to a search engine that I know uses the primary source (usually Bing or Google) indirectly.

So for example, instead of comparing unknown results directly to the Bing SERP, I will compare it to Ecosia's SERP because it is powered by Bing will generally be less manipulated (i.e. closer to what Bing just returns in their API). Bing also adds a lot of other information to their own SERP which they might not make available in their API.

It's definitely not a fingerprint, but the source of organic SERPs are almost always identifiable.

chris_fon DuckDuckGo Founding Member in Global Privacy Control Standards Effort

Gigablast, Mojeek, and Yandex (already a source of DDG results in Russia I believe) all have their own search indexes and APIs to access them.

For a completely independent search engine, Gigabalst is surprisingly good in terms of index and relevance. Not as good as Google or Bing, but I think it is a one-man operation. Mojeek also just received an investment to build out their index.

At Runnaroo, I partially use Google as the backend, but I have done a good amount of testing on the above options in case Google or Bing stop being options.

Just as important as the search results, Bing provides the monetization for DDG through their ad network, so DDG is dependent on Bing for two critical parts of the business. I don't think Bing will ever kick them off because it must be very profitable for them and they need to do everything they can to get marketshare against Google.