Top
Best
New

Posted by dreamforever 4 hours ago

I built a 500k-domain search engine for makers in a weekend for $10(alexmorleyfinch.github.io)
87 points | 47 comments
tpowell 19 minutes ago|
It takes a bit of setup and a huge download, but every time I need a good domain I follow this old post from Derek Sivers. I have Claude de-dupe it and turn it into a searchable database (on my machine), then have it search genres and terms I'm looking for. It's a task Claude is very well-suited to, from the technical implementation to back-and-forth about selections. [link]: https://sive.rs/com
iFire 3 hours ago||
Here's my impressions of your algorithm:

1. read each site

2. rent a 4090 with https://vast.ai to run vllm

3. let llm model invent its own category and tag names freely

4. save 1KB of metadata each

  a. a small local language model that reads each one and writes a name, two or three sentences, a category, and a handful of tags.
5. `code is going up as open source` soon (TM)
iambenm 1 hour ago||
Code appears to already be up: https://github.com/alexmorleyfinch/marlin
jeroenhd 2 hours ago|||
The technical details are on another page: https://alexmorleyfinch.github.io/marlin/history/v1/article/...

Your impressions seem about right, but there are a few control steps it seems.

moffkalast 1 hour ago||
They really needn't have specified "in a weekend" cause yeah we can tell.

Since when has low effort become a selling point anyhow?

smokel 15 minutes ago||
I typically interpret it as an excuse, not a selling point.
headz 3 hours ago||
TS;DR: Too Sloppy; Didn't Read.
juleiie 3 hours ago|
Yeah it’s ai generated obviously but as I said previously which some people didn’t like - don’t judge the tools, judge the content.

I don’t care if robot hand written this or black or white. It’s useful.

order-matters 5 minutes ago|||
did you edit it? did you fully read everything yourself and take out anything extra that didnt need to be in there like unnecessary comparisons and typical AI idioms? tweak the language to be less dramatic or emphatic about things that do not need emphasis?

AI is a great tool, but it is somewhere between a 3D printer and a CNC machine. it can make something smooth and easy to handle and maybe good enough for personal use but you would want to run it through some Finishing steps before giving its output to someone else. In some cases thats using the output as a mold for a full recreation and other times maybe its just sanding it a bit, smoothing out some rough spots and putting paint on it.

youre right not to care about if something was made by a human or a tool, but the full presentation of the content including editing is part of the content when it comes to a write-up.

abc3354 3 hours ago||||
In the expression "AI slop", "AI" is about the tools, "slop" is about the content
uean 3 hours ago||||
I'm not going to spend an hour trying to distill the AI-slop to find out what potential golden nugget may lie in there.

It's impossible to judge the content if it's buried under a landfill. "If you won't take the time to write it, I won't take the time to read it."

juleiie 3 hours ago||
[flagged]
vivzkestrel 2 hours ago|||
- you are going to regret offloading this much of your brain's critical thinking to an external source in the long run

- every night a good number of neuron connections in your brain are automatically severed because you did not use that ability

- over long periods of time, it ll take you to a point where you wont be able to write a simple factorial program on your own without gpt telling you

- i am not saying this to incite you or mock you or anything. i am just concerned about how much of your thinking you are offloading

danggggg 2 hours ago||
[dead]
fg137 1 hour ago||||
> because that’s how things will look like from now on.

No it's not.

People are increasingly getting fed up with slops like this -- you can see comments in HN discussions.

Many people just completely skip those articles.

prepend 36 minutes ago|||
More importantly, I’ve started my own little blacklist of people and site I just ignore.

There’s people at work whose messages get completely ignored after too many times of posting verbose, useless, ai slop.

gist 37 minutes ago|||
> People are increasingly getting fed up with slops like this -- you can see comments in HN discussions.

Why claim 'people' (plenty of people get value from satisficing) and even try to use 'see comments in HN discussions' as if there is something that actually documents that ie 'we all think it'.

I skimmed it and even skimming it I got value from (what some others here) call 'slop'. (The value was basically it gave me an idea of something I could implement and again I didn't have to study it or even understand everything (or agree) just seeing someone did that made me think about something I might want to do.

sporedro 1 hour ago||||
If I want to read AI output, I’ll just ask my own AI. I’m not going to bother reading someone else’s AI.
uean 2 hours ago||||
Thanks for this. My point is proven.
juleiie 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
flyingcoder 2 hours ago|||
How did web3 and crypto work out for you buddy?
jorisw 1 hour ago|||
You’re confusing moving on with the times, and using new tools wrong
prepend 37 minutes ago||||
It’s not my problem because I can safely skip ai slop without fomo.

It’s extremely rare that someone smart with something smart to say produces this crap.

Like someone said upthread if the author isn’t willing to spend time writing cogently then I don’t think it’s worth my time to try to parse it.

yieldcrv 2 hours ago||||
yes but tell your slopywriter to be less verbose, get to the point
juleiie 2 hours ago||
[flagged]
nxndjdkdksmsb 1 hour ago|||
[dead]
fg137 1 hour ago||||
> judge the content

The content itself is slop.

ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago|||
"slop" is a perfectly valid judgement of content

surely if we're expected to read this ourselves, the author can write it themselves?

indeed, it's helpful to the author, too: writing helps you learn

ModernMech 5 minutes ago||
I dunno, you'll notice several people here saying that got value from it, despite others not engaging with it at all. If your filter is that you don't engage with anything you don't expect a priori to get value from (based on weak signals), you'll miss a lot.
lagrange77 20 minutes ago||
Took me a few minutes to realise it's not a domain name search engine.
marginalia_nu 3 hours ago||
Interesting project. Website discovery is indeed in a pretty dire spot, definitely a space that needs innovation. An auto-labeled website directory isn't that silly of an idea.

I have a 400 GB sqlite database with samples of rendered root document DOMs I use for ad detection in Marginalia Search I've been meaning to explore similar ideas using.

alightsoul 1 hour ago||
I have been wanting do do this. The biggest source of domains is certificate transparency logs. Also ICANN zone files. According to some scientific papers these cover 88% of all registered domains. You could crawl dns for CNAME records with all ipv4 IPs by distributing requests across dozens of DNS servers, the internet archive or the common crawl but doing it for the internet archive is a dick move without giving them money

There's about 200 million active domains currently. That's about 66% of all businesses worldwide of which there are around 300 million. Around 100 to 150 million have active webpages

jeromechoo 1 hour ago||
It feels like we've hit a point where search engines can become what "todo list apps" were for devs 10 years ago.

What a homebrewed solution lacks in coverage it excels in indexing and serving a small slice of the internet really really well.

marginalia_nu 51 minutes ago||
To be fair they are a supremely interesting problem to hack away at, and one that will meet you where you are.

Almost anyone can put together a basic search engine in a few thousand lines of code, it's just not very hard to make a program that will index a few million documents better than Confluence.

Then, between that first ansatz and a working scalable internet search engine, you have a pile of interesting problems touching every aspect of computer science and computer hardware and networking, enough so that hundreds of people will have gotten PhDs in narrow sub-problems of those problems you'll be facing.

It's great because you can just tackle the stuff you feel comfortable approaching and leave the rest for later.

fg137 1 hour ago||
Sorry I have a lot of trouble understanding what this is useful for. Like, I am never going to replace it with Google, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT or even Bing.
dreamforever 8 minutes ago||
It's not for that, sorry, I should have been more specific. It's for people who wanna put in the effort and steer their own crawl to surface their own slice of the web. The article is just a little story of the journey
prepend 33 minutes ago||
I was wondering the same thing. I’ve wished for just a big blob of the web to grep and regex through, but I don’t think this is that much easier than using duckduckgo or even google.
eggbrain 3 hours ago||
This is actually where I see software going in the short term -- cloud moving to local.

A few years ago, if you wanted translation, you'd use Google Translate. If you wanted to search the web, you'd use Google search.

But for a few gigabytes, you can now install nllb-200-distilled-600M, and get translations for almost any language locally. You can have your computer crawl the web, create abstracts and categorizations for websites, and build search exactly as you want it.

The main limiter now is hard drive space (and to an extent, local compute) -- but right now it feels like the 70s again where the terminal into a remote server turned into building applications locally.

dylan604 2 hours ago|
The number of times we've gone from cloud/server access via terminal to local compute back and forth is something that always makes me laugh a bit.
an0malous 2 hours ago||
It's more of a pipeline than a back-and-forth. New abilities happen in the cloud first because they require specialized, higher capacity resources and then move towards being local as the resource usage gets optimized.
BaudouinVH 1 hour ago||
How do you build a list of domains you want to index ? I see there is a fetcher and a spider in the code but so for I haven't found how to build that list.
dreamforever 36 seconds ago|
Ah, I forgot to mention that anywhere. You have to provide your own. You can start from a small set, like 10 websites you like that have a bit of character, and it will also add any domains it finds from those 10
pimlottc 2 hours ago||
Sometimes I think people forget how capable computers are. 500k is not much. You can just slap that in a Lucene instance. This is a solved problem.
marginalia_nu 2 hours ago|
Approaching search by just tossing the data in Lucene is how you end up with Confluence's search box though.
pavel_lishin 1 hour ago|
From the screenshot, it's very funny that one of the indexed sites is www.llresearch.org, which looks like it's run by a crackpot.
More comments...