I was lying in bed this morning thinking that I should really start my own search engine, so fantastic to find this British company!
My idea was to start with all the independent blogs which Google deliberately deranked till they could not be found. I produced/used software that could have done that. So, please can we have a “blog only” search option!
But, how to make it pay? I think the way to do that, is to enable people to do some sophisticated searching by e.g. using wildcards and regexs and charge per search. So, here are a few ideas:
I often get EXTREMELY irrated with other search engines that don’t look for the text I enter. This is particularly irritating at the moment as I am going through some old English names and trying to find any mention of them. But, I am also interested in finding names like them. So, I will use different search engines because they have different levels of strictness. So, I have used search engines to find old places where the spelling has changed.
In a similar vein, on some subjects, I ONLY want a UK answer. For example I’m sick to death of being offered a result for Perth Australia when searching for Perth. But, sometimes I am searching for places or articles about foreign places.
Then, I started to learn Italian … so I started looking for Italian articles … but will some browsers return anything except English!
Finally, I’m sure the main reason Google started censorship on the web is that because the company were all democrats, they hated the way that sometimes they found a pro republican site. So, although Google’s approach is evil, rather than just removing the political bias they inbuild into Google, why not give it as an option?
It’s not quite what you’re requesting here, but it’s possible that given your want to create a search engine and search across a specific subset of sites you might be interested in Focus: Mojeek Focus (Bookmark) Search Engine
Mojeek uses lexical not semantic search. In other words Mojeek looks for explicit matches to the words or phrases in your search query. These search queries are compared with text in the webpages that we have indexed and their incoming links. Mojeek does not attempt to interpret meaning from your query.
Hopefully we’re giving you something useful in this respect. For sure it will be different from a lot of the other options, not least because the bulk will likely be metasearch engines pulling from Google or Bing.
For this and the Italian part, it is possible that you will find utility in changing some of the options in this part of Search Settings - Mojeek. Results language and location in particular:
This is an interesting proposition, I guess one thing which makes this difficult is the question what do you use to measure political bias? I am aware of a few ratings systems, with AllSides: Media Bias | AllSides being the one that I have encountered in use in the wild the most.
This being said, some people have very big disagreements with this (and other systems), in my experience a lot of people tend to anchor whatever they believe as the political middle which is possibly a human tendency to believe you are a moderate regardless of what you believe, and possibly just a hole in the Left < > Right classification of politics (we have come a long way since 1789).
A final question to throw into that set would be by which country’s “left” and “right” would this be judged? As a UK citizen it can sometimes be a bit of a mindspinner to see the things which happen in other English-speaking countries and are categorised as beliefs of one side of the other.
This being said, it’s an interesting idea, and giving more control to the end user can’t be a bad thing…
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