So, in the era of increasingly good AI powered tools and general search engines full of SEO spam, last week I started creating something little old school and against the trends.
For now It’s a have-fun-and-find-out project that main aim is to provide good search results for general web development queries with a special focus on independent blog authors.
The thesis is that no SEO spam website is in the index, which will already filter out most annoying noise on Google/Bing.
Search results are grouped per type: docs, blogs and magazines (e.g. blog platforms or bigger websites).
For now it’s far from being done in terms of having a full index, but in most cases it already replaces my go-to search engine when I’m looking up some stuff during work.
I’m looking forward hearing out what y’all think and if you think it makes sense overall I can only encourage you to post some links to blogs or docs that are still missing in the index. I’m more than happy to add it to the crawler.
Responds like: “nei, total shit, who would need that” also accepted but constructive critique more appreciated ;)
EDIT: everyone many thanks for all your voices and comments. I’m super grateful for all of them and happy that we have such place like Lemmy!
That makes sense. I really like that the documentation is right at the top; many times all I want to do is find the right page in the official docs. You might want to look at how results are prioritized though: right now when I search for something simple like “how to center a div”, that result from Mozilla’s docs is included but it’s hidden as the second or third result. I would expect the page that’s explicitly about centering a div to be the top result, followed by the docs page for the element itself and maybe pages for flex or grid or something. That’s a really simple example, so maybe it’s not the target of this project, but I would still hope that simple topics are covered just as well as complex ones.
EDIT: I was a bit mistaken: “how to center a div” does bring up the Mozilla documentation for centering an element, but “center a div” brings up a page about accessibility as the top result.