Somebody created a search engine that roughly strips off the 1 million most popular sites of the web, and lets you search everything else.
http://millionshort.com/
You wouldn't think it'd work, but the comments on HackerNews are almost unanimously positive (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304). Fresh and interesting recipe pages, discovering great but slightly obscure weblogs on specialty topics, "it felt like using Google 10 years ago".
Try it out.
More testimonials
Quoteyayadarsh --- After a few test searches, this is surprisingly effective for things which I had resigned "un-findable" because of poor Google results. This is most apparent on non-technical things, in this case specific Jazz chord fingerings for a guitar class I am taking. I am very interested as to what comes of this, or rather what is influenced by its implications.
cjlars --- Guitar chords / tabs / lessons are a terrible SEO spam offender... Look at that! I finally found an accurate transcription of "Bohemian Rhapsody"
taxonomyman (author of millionshort) --- That was exactly the goal. In our opinion the "un-findable" as you put it represents a gold mine of information yet to be absorbed and enjoyed.
That's a surprisingly clever and simple solution to the problem of Google fail and SEO crap.
That's pretty cool.
When you do a search for "Principia Discordia" you end up getting all kinds of interesting results. Including a site from some guy Scotto who turned the PD into a one-man play.
Also, the pd.org site ends up showing up tops in the list.
Neat find.
Ooooh, nice find Trip.
Via this, I've discovered that there is a village on the island of Santorini (Thera) named Kallisti... which was apparently the Minoan name of the island!
http://www.celebrategreece.com/products/5-kallisti-most-beautiful
'The island's original name of KALLISTI, meaning "most beautiful", was given to it by the Minoans of Crete.'
(see the link for some archaeological excavations of the city of Akrotiri)
So, apparently, the word Kallisti has been associated with extreme beauty and ultra-violence for a LONG LONG TIME. At least 1200 years before Plato (when the volcano exploded)......
This is going to be a handy website to use.
Better use it quickly because as everybody and their dog start cutting the 1M most popular sites they will get less popular and everything will flip upside down and upload will become download and vice versa and they will start throwing routers at each other to "get more wireless" while the streets fill with the smoke of burning plastic as everybody tries to build the biggest "fire" wall.
Quote from: Triple Zero on May 02, 2012, 03:49:13 PM
Better use it quickly because as everybody and their dog start cutting the 1M most popular sites they will get less popular and everything will flip upside down and upload will become download and vice versa and they will start throwing routers at each other to "get more wireless" while the streets fill with the smoke of burning plastic as everybody tries to build the biggest "fire" wall.
:lulz:
This is FUCKING COOL AS SHIT
Thanks Trip!
I am not sure how I am going to use but I crammed it into my brower so I can use it later. Thanks Trip.
Quote from: Triple Zero on May 02, 2012, 09:33:59 AM
Somebody created a search engine that roughly strips off the 1 million most popular sites of the web, and lets you search everything else.
http://millionshort.com/
You wouldn't think it'd work, but the comments on HackerNews are almost unanimously positive (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304). Fresh and interesting recipe pages, discovering great but slightly obscure weblogs on specialty topics, "it felt like using Google 10 years ago".
Try it out.
You are AMAZING for finding this, TZ.
:) Thanks. But I just read HackerNews, it's got a lot of upvotes, everybody seems to just love it. Since the site just started out, you can send them a message to thank them (or him/her, dunno how many people are on this project. DuckDuckGo is also being managed by one guy) for being amazing/awesome/etc and a real person will read it and feel appreciated ;-)
As I understand they're also still tweaking the site, to make better choices about what more to filter, and fix minor user interface issues (for instance I read it in HN thread that when they first posted it, it didn't preserve the query in the search box when changing the number of top sites to block, things like that).
I agree it's wonderful. I showed it to a few friends tonight and it just seems that everybody has a couple of pet queries to try out that give them shitty bland results on Google, and are without exception pleasantly surprised by the unexpected depth of results they get.
As far as I've understood, like DDG, they don't run their own crawler but get their data from another search giant. In case of MillionShort it seems to be Yahoo, and DDG uses Bing's database (in addition to some of their own stuff).