Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dredmorbius 2752 days ago
An anticommercial search filter strikes me as increasingly needed.
1 comments

I've noticed that search results in the closest thing I have to a field (linguistics) are usually not very good unless I already know exactly what I'm looking for. If I search for information on some language, unless it's very well-known, I get Wikipedia, Wikipedia mirrors, fake dictionaries and other automatically generated useless SEO garbage, Google Books OCR errors, and so on - if there's anything useful, it's on the seventh or eighth page.

I'm not optimistic about general-purpose search engines, TBH. As the userbase of a search engine increases, so does the incentive to game it with SEO garbage - and preventing SEO garbage feels isomorphic security, except you can't even hold out hope for formal verification.

Linguistics has people who compile lists of resources, and there's enough of a community that if I'm trying to find something, I can ask around and someone might know. Google is sometimes useful, but it's a hell of a slog to get anything out of it, and that's with years of experience in what long lists of keywords to type in to cut through some of the crap.