Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

No, you don't want a full text search engine. If you think you do, you don't remember the pre-Google world. It was impossible to use the older search engines to find a reasonable explanation of a common topic, because to Alta Vista and other search engines of that era, every page that contained a given term was considered equal to every other page, and it would give you all of them in a random order. You could add lots of AND and OR to try to exclude what you didn't want, and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.

But when Google first came out, it was a shock. You could just search for something like "Linux", and the most authoritative sites all showed up on the first page.




and this might cut you down to 40 or 50 pages to go through to maybe find what you want.

At least those search engines gave you that many results to go through... now Google gives you less than that, full of spam (despite the index probably containing far more), and you'll be in CAPTCHA hellban if you try harder to get to the rest.


A full text search with a good ranking is still a full text search. The point here is that Google used to do the job just fine, but no longer is.


AltaVista's killer feature was the NEAR operator.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: