by nafnlj » Fri Feb 02, 2024 5:36 pm
Yukinu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 4:56 am
Interesting, they seem to have written their own crawler and everything, pretty impressive. Also the search engine works very well without JavaScript.
The only thing I noted didn't work with JS is the ability to boost or discard domains using a GUI. But you can still write rules and have them work without JS.
Yukinu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 4:56 am
I tested out a few queries, the breadth and depth of the index is pretty close to Brave at this point, but without corporate backing. In the long run, this could be a good option as a general purpose search engine, and I'm going to create a search shortcut and set it as my default for a few days to see if I can run into some search edge cases.
I think it depends from my limited testing. I follow a version of the approach you articulated in your search engine experiment articles and keep shortcuts for many search engines and site-specific searches (I probably refer more queries to Startpage/DDG/Brave/Mojeek, but similar idea). If I were going to try searching like most people do -- simply replacing Google with a different search engine 1 for 1 and not calling others with shortcuts -- I could get by with Brave whereas I could not with Stract, Mojeek, or another similar independent engine/index, InfoTiger. One major case for me is searches for law resources. Brave is about 85-90% as good as the Google/Bing indexes, depending on what you are looking for. Stract and Mojeek are wholly inadequate in that area (to be fair, I think many of the resources block non-Google/Bing crawlers). I would like to see Stract improve here though since it's ability to write domain rankings would be helpful. I wrote one for Brave and it works decently well. (I'm setting aside all the questions about how Brave doesn't provide much information about its crawler.)
Yukinu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 4:56 am
I tested out a few queries, the breadth and depth of the index is pretty close to Brave at this point, but without corporate backing. In the long run, this could be a good option as a general purpose search engine, and I'm going to create a search shortcut and set it as my default for a few days to see if I can run into some search edge cases.
I look forward to reading your impressions after you complete your testing. I made one useful find with Stract that none of the others, including Marginalia, turned up. I am doing some research for an article about the 2002 NBA MVP race. Stract returned a 2002 small forum thread with some good posts to include in my article since one of the main points is to look at how the race was viewed at the time.
[quote=Yukinu post_id=624 time=1706072168 user_id=2]
Interesting, they seem to have written their own crawler and everything, pretty impressive. Also the search engine works very well without JavaScript.
[/quote]
The only thing I noted didn't work with JS is the ability to boost or discard domains using a GUI. But you can still write rules and have them work without JS.
[quote=Yukinu post_id=624 time=1706072168 user_id=2]
I tested out a few queries, the breadth and depth of the index is pretty close to Brave at this point, but without corporate backing. In the long run, this could be a good option as a general purpose search engine, and I'm going to create a search shortcut and set it as my default for a few days to see if I can run into some search edge cases.
[/quote]
I think it depends from my limited testing. I follow a version of the approach you articulated in your search engine experiment articles and keep shortcuts for many search engines and site-specific searches (I probably refer more queries to Startpage/DDG/Brave/Mojeek, but similar idea). If I were going to try searching like most people do -- simply replacing Google with a different search engine 1 for 1 and not calling others with shortcuts -- I could get by with Brave whereas I could not with Stract, Mojeek, or another similar independent engine/index, InfoTiger. One major case for me is searches for law resources. Brave is about 85-90% as good as the Google/Bing indexes, depending on what you are looking for. Stract and Mojeek are wholly inadequate in that area (to be fair, I think many of the resources block non-Google/Bing crawlers). I would like to see Stract improve here though since it's ability to write domain rankings would be helpful. I wrote one for Brave and it works decently well. (I'm setting aside all the questions about how Brave doesn't provide much information about its crawler.)
[quote=Yukinu post_id=624 time=1706072168 user_id=2]
I tested out a few queries, the breadth and depth of the index is pretty close to Brave at this point, but without corporate backing. In the long run, this could be a good option as a general purpose search engine, and I'm going to create a search shortcut and set it as my default for a few days to see if I can run into some search edge cases.
[/quote]
I look forward to reading your impressions after you complete your testing. I made one useful find with Stract that none of the others, including Marginalia, turned up. I am doing some research for an article about the 2002 NBA MVP race. Stract returned a 2002 small forum thread with some good posts to include in my article since one of the main points is to look at how the race was viewed at the time.
