A search engine built by the crowd(blog.archify.com) |
A search engine built by the crowd(blog.archify.com) |
Google Toolbar and now Chrome report this data back to Google, and most search pros believe "serp bounce back" and "time on site" are key signals Google uses.
PageRank and DwellRank are not either-or choices.
Here's my theory: Google uses PageRank to decide what pages to "try out" for a query (i.e. display a page in the SERP for a sampling of queries). If the page gets clicks AND has good "DwellRank" then it gets progressively better and better rankings. If a new page enters that beats it, it falls.
This approach is very Googly -- they love to test. They love to decide if product features are good or not by giving them a sampling of traffic. It would be insane of them not to extend this approach to search.
So the upshot is, use "PageRank" to decide which pages deserve an audition, and use "DwellRank" to decide the winners.
Since 40% of the clicks go to #1, 10% to #2, 8% to #3 etc,Google can audition pages using DwellRank without affecting the experience of the majority of their users.
-Gerald Disclosure: I am the CTO of archify/Blippex.
-Gerald Disclosure: I am the CTO of archify/Blippex
I think that a lot of search engine enquiries are essentially questions, with an answer that can be considered correct. Absolutely not all, but I think enough that they should certainly be considered. In that case, a site which immediately and clearly answers the question should be given, I want my answer within seconds, not minutes. If you give me the site that answers my question and that users spend the most time on, that's the exact opposite of what I want in this case.
Here's an example, I search "Population of America", your site's top result is sporcle.com, a quiz site. I bet people spend ages on there guessing the population of various countries etc, but I'd prefer to just get my answer.
That said, it appears such queries are handled outside the main algorithm by your competitors. Both Google and DuckDuckGo will give a card, at the top of the result, answering my query - I don't even have to visit a website.
I guess the tl;dr is that it's awesome that this is ambitious, but I challenge the assumption your algorithm is desirable for the majority of search results. Neither is Google's really though, so maybe this is an overly harsh criticism of something Google probably did very poorly early on too.
-Gerald Disclosure: I am the CTO of archify/Blippex.
Oh, and a quick suggestion: Have you considered a Firefox search engine addon? I do most searches from the omnibar, and I think more people would switch search engine up there than manually go via blippex.com
Also I don't like the idea of having to install a plugin on my browser so that the urls I visit and how much time I spent on them is tracked, even if suposedly my identity is never tracked. Once the plugin is installed how can I know if a new version of the plugin won't track more parameters?
When I read the title I though it was referring to a distributed search engine like YacY or Seeks.
Full disclosure: I work at Google (though not on web search).
Your search actually sucks, perhaps because your index is woefully inadequate. How many pages are in it? Maybe you should use common crawl?
Yahoo is pretty good, and was used as a verb for all of the 90s and early 2000s. IMO not as good as "I'm going to google that", "I'm going to yahoo that" sounds vaguely sexual.
DuckDuckGo and AskJeeves are terribad: "I'm going to duck duck go that"? No.
Blippex is better than ddg or ask jeeves, but still not too great. Coming up with a good product name is hard but is crucial for usability / spread through culture. Reminds me of blumpkin.
Despite dubstep being apparently totally uncool, I'm cool with that.
Wait for the bass drop.
-Gerald Disclosure: I am the CTO of archify/Blippex.
After talking with friends we explored the idea of a user side traffic tracking app as a way to feed the search engine, but I couldn't get enough traction and no one wanted to challenge not only Google but also IE/Firefox/Safari etc. because we felt it would be its own browser.
Alas.
Now a days I am more concerned about possible privacy issues, I feel for them launching a search engine that actively asks you to be tracked (even if anonymously), it's a hard sell during this current resistance to that entire idea.
Why not a browser add-on or extension?
It's a catch 22: the results won't get better unless people use the service, but people aren't going to use it if the results are bad in the first place. If I install the extension but use Google, it's a one-way relationship that only they get data out of. Not very good for me.
Gerald (Disclosure: archify/Blippex CTO)
Out of curiousity, how do you prevent the case of some random malicious user impersonating your chrome extension and just issueing a bunch of "dwells" to your server. I.e. can I just curl what this javascript file (https://github.com/blippex/blippex_plugin_chrome/blob/master...) is requesting to boost my own pages ranking?
-Gerald, CTO archify/Blippex
gmail
news ycombinator
countries in europe wiki
Did you gather enough data already ?
All of these seraches were not successful. There was no Facebook link in the first search, no Gmail link in the second one , no news.ycombinator in the 3rd one, and the only wikipedia link I got in the last search was :
{A language/framework/... you want to learn about} tutorial
As some comments said, the best website are not necessarily the one you spend most of your time on. But tutorials are an exception.
Edit: Ah the niceness of asynchronous javascript. It returns an error (I can see it in the JS console) but the page never displays that to me. Good ol' page reloads wouldn't have done that </rant>. In any case, the issue is my header modifying add-on. It injects "'\ into the x-forwarded-for header, causing your application to error. You probably have an sql injection in your code somewhere.
If you want to track the issue down, my IP is 83.161.210.237 or 2001:980:1f44::/48 if you support IPv6. Timestamp around 17:51 UTC+2.
Just disable cookies in your browser, load Blippex, and search. I searched for "shakespeare" in Firefox 22 (where I have cookies turned off), and the result (below the fold, incidentally), was
> Nothing found > We're all like "What the blip, man?" too. ...
Same search in Chrome 28 works fine (and interesting, too).
This is my pet peeve on the web, and so common with HN posts that I don't usually bother to point it out. But this seems like something you'd want to know.
gb@blippex.org