Posted by mfkhalil 4/3/2025
Why is everyone so fixated on keywords for instance? They have their uses, but librarians and people who do research for a living also use subject headings. These are still human designated as far as I know.
People who are experts in an area often search directly by author. An actually useful tool would be something that cross-references advisor-advisee relationships, who was colleagues with who as a function of time, etc, and finds additional sources based on author networks. You maybe could do something like this for the web too, as I suspect a lot of high quality pages made by individuals are related by such interpersonal networks. A lot of spammy garbage sites probably have network relations to each other as well.
I think where MatterRank shines right now is for finding results where you wouldn't mind waiting an extra 20-30 seconds for an added layer of vetting, as opposed to just wanting a quick answer.
Having said that, we are definitely working on making it faster and more useful for everyday queries.
I've not used it, but anecdotally, I can refine my own search query to get what I want, or conclude it doesn't exist, within 20-30s. Assuming ~5s per search to write, search, read, decide, that's 4-6 searches.
Do you think you're getting more value than 4 iterations on the initial search term? Are you always getting it in one search, or do you end up still needing to refine the search term, extending it beyond that 20-30s?
Definitely not for all cases, but in some cases yes. Where it really makes a difference is when you're looking for qualitative attributes of the webpage, rather than what words show up in it (e.g. “written by a woman", "is likely to convince someone who supports Trump", "talks about X/Y/Z but not A/B.”) It reads the actual content, so you can get oddly niche in a way you just can’t with keywords alone.
Edit (hn doesn’t let me post this fast): is finding places to buy shit really an issue? How many times in your life have you thought “damn I know what I want to buy, I just don’t know from which site to buy it”? That’s hard to imagine of anyone. This user story just seems like a problem made up by search indexes to court capital.
Edit2: Kagi is great. I'm a full subscriber.
I find I do it quite a lot. When I was researching solar. When I needed some actuators recently. Now I'm looking for a trailer. And so on.
Obviously not groceries, but whenever um investigating something new I find commercial sites to be very helpful.
I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?
That would definitely have enriched my comment, but, unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything in particular in the moment, and can't now. seb1204 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564922) mentions one common kind of use case for me: I want to buy some small utility item that I'm used to finding in the hardware store, but it's sufficiently specialty that it's not worth it for the hardware store to carry it, and it's sufficiently small that its price would triple or quadruple if I paid the manufacturer's shipping costs.
> I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?
As I say, I'm stuck in the situation of being vague because I can't think of the last specific time this affected me, but I have definitely dealt with relatively small sellers where the purchase option on their webaite is "here's a link to buy from our Amazon store."
If you mean pop-ups, MatterRank can't handle that at the moment because it evaluates markdown content, but it's something we're looking at adding. In the meantime, I'd recommend a good ad-blocker.
Use Brave Search with Goggles (https://search.brave.com/goggles/discover). It's great.