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I'm creating a curated search engine for web developers. Asking for a feedback (kukei.eu)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by sznowicki@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev

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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!

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[–] DrakeRichards@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It’s a good start. I’m curious why you didn’t include a section for social media like StackOverflow or Reddit. If I go to Google with a question, it’s usually for an edge case not covered by the documentation. Maybe add them as a section at the bottom to indicate that they might be less relevant?

Also, this might just be a web developer thing, but why include blogs? Almost all coding blogs I’ve seen are SEO cancer that just copy from the documentation or each other. Are there actually useful blogs out there that I’ve just been missing?

[–] sznowicki@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

SO and Reddit are on the TODO list. It even had SO (in the bottom indeed) once but not via crawling, via SO Search API. It has very poor quality results and was super slow so I had to remove it while thinking of a better solution. Crawling entire SO might be little too much of this project at this state tho but if I have enough courage and hours at night I might parse that 20GB stack overflow archive dump and try doing something useful with it.

Same for Reddit but here I have mixed feelings about it in general and hope it's going to die soon being replaced by amazing Lemmy communities.

I also used to type some question and end with "reddit" in Google to get good quality content, but here with kukei the experiment is whether blogosphere can replace it properly when index is promoting it.

Why blogs?

This is my main thing. To promote good quality blogs that I tried to follow via RSS but somehow never did. Having them all indexed (and more, some Mastodon community gave me amazing links to index) makes me actually visit them often.

For the "SEO cancer" that where curation comes into play. Before crawling I check unknown blogs to me and decide whether something goes in or not.

[–] DrakeRichards@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.