[HN Gopher] Nona - A German Search Engine
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Nona - A German Search Engine
Author : danskeren
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-11-18 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nona.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nona.de)
| the-dude wrote:
| I searched for _Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan_ and it
| had plenty of hits.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I thought you spell Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan
| with 3 "f", i.e. Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan
| quaintdev wrote:
| Feels snappy. I could find some people I know which I was not
| sure if it would find.
|
| English version of the main interface would have been great. I
| have added it to my Firefox anyway.
| chespinoza wrote:
| I wonder what would be better? having search engines able to deal
| with different languages or having different search engines for
| every possible language, Don't see the point for the latter to be
| honest, having an universal language makes more sense to me.
| visarga wrote:
| First we do search. After retrieval comes question answering
| based on the retrieved snippets. Then comes multi-hop question
| answering with the need to correlate information between
| multiple sources. Just watched a video showing how it can be
| done https://youtu.be/-ethT5YDVmo?t=1256
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Regardless of whether you serve them through the same search
| box, from a practical standpoint, I think you'd want basically
| a separate back-end for each language. Stuff like relative term
| importance, word extraction, ranking, they all benefit from
| being kept separately.
| blondin wrote:
| different search engines for every language.
|
| it looks like a lot, but a typical user will only use a handful
| of them. and having each tailored to a language or region is
| better than a universal search engine.
| Borrible wrote:
| And there still is the German meta search engine, MetaGer. I
| already used it more than 20 years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaGer
|
| https://metager.org/
|
| It also has a TOR hidden service:
|
| http://metagerv65pwclop2rsfzg4jwowpavpwd6grhhlvdgsswvo6ii4ak...
| keb_ wrote:
| I just used this for a few English-language queries and the
| results... are surprisingly great.
| andrefuchs wrote:
| Clever name! Anon backwards.
| poolie wrote:
| Hah, you are the first one who got it :)
| marban wrote:
| There's only one chance to make a lasting impression as an
| aspiring Google competitor and there isn't a single one that even
| made it into my bookmarks. I understand there's enough love for
| DDG on HN but life is too short for mediocre horizontal search
| results.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| My results are the same or better than Google in DDG as far as
| I can tell. I haven't missed Google a bit since I switched. So,
| either the difference for the average user is minimal or there
| isn't a difference.
| Semaphor wrote:
| It's a frequent complaint. I wonder if some people just use
| search differently and the lack of tracking makes it work
| worse for them on DDG? I'm in the same boat as you (except
| for their horrible decision to just ignore what you search
| and show you almost random results when they don't get
| enough/any hits) and rarely ever use !g.
| HelenePhisher wrote:
| Part of that might be that non-english searches in DDG are
| a horrible experience.
| freediver wrote:
| How do you evaluate?
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| Great effort. As a individual developer, How does using Bing
| results work? Can I signup for their search engine API and modify
| them based on my secret sauce, without raking up 100$+ bill every
| month?
| freediver wrote:
| The bill will be based on your usage. For Bing API it is $7 per
| 1,000 queries for full results (news/video/images). So just raw
| results without any other effort will cost you about $7/mo
| assuming you do 30 queries/day.
| poolie wrote:
| ...and you are not allowed to cache results - so you actually
| have to call the api everytime you do a search.
| jtagx wrote:
| Looks like they are using Bing / Microsoft for their search
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Seems like most new search engines are "bing + some other
| sources." Just wondering, does Bing charge for this use?
|
| Personally, in the past month I've noticed a significant
| degradation of results from DDG, and since I don't know what's
| going on I just blame Bing. Because of that, each time we have
| posts about alternative engines I first check to see if they're
| not using Bing. But they all are!
| danskeren wrote:
| They list their data sources here:
| https://hilfe.nona.de/features/datenquellen
|
| Bing for Web+Image (and I assume News+Video) Search,
| ListenNotes for Podcast, OpenWeatherMap for their Instant
| Answer weather results, etc.
|
| I like their UI, and as far as I can tell then their icons are
| custom made, at least I can't find them anywhere.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Yes and a few other data sources for weather, stocks and so on
| (https://hilfe.nona.de/features/datenquellen). And it's made
| with Symfony (https://hilfe.nona.de/ueber-nona/technik-tools).
| trutannus wrote:
| Regardless, they return far better search results for queries
| in German than Google does. For example, if you look for
| something about a changing legislation in the Bundestag, they
| will have articles published in the past 30 minutes, where as
| Google won't surface the same articles for a few weeks.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| I like that they offer an ad-free experience for 2EUR a month. I
| would like more of the internet to offer this type of
| alternative.
| alexfringes wrote:
| Interestingly, this approach seems to be gaining more traction
| in Germany specifically. One of the larger newspapers, Die
| Zeit, applies it for the free tier of its website. There's a
| big annoying modal when you go to zeit.de if you want to see
| that approach in practice. Hilariously the choice I make in
| that modal never seems to stick. Maybe there's a separate GDPR-
| compliant toggle somewhere to allow them to track that I want
| to be tracked ha!
| Semaphor wrote:
| Zeit, Spiegel, Golem... Those are the ones I frequently see,
| but there are probably more.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| Google makes like 50$ per month from you and Facebook makes 30$
| per month (or something in this ballpark), things are way
| beyond what most people are willing to pay.
| [deleted]
| theK wrote:
| 30 cent per user per month, maybe. Not 30 usd
| petters wrote:
| How do you then explain Facebook's revenue being 86B in
| 2020?
| syberiyxx wrote:
| Google Ads cost $~4-8 per lead for our company. Google is
| raking it in.
| [deleted]
| MildlySerious wrote:
| The alternative to paying for an ad-free experience is ad-
| blockers. I very much doubt that they make anywhere near as
| much from me.
| anticristi wrote:
| 30$/user/year seems to be accurate. Facebook reported 86
| billion USD for 2020 [1] and 2.89 billion MAU [2]. When
| computing the ratio, the geek inside me feels particularly
| satisfied to reduce billion from the numerator and
| denominator. :)
|
| So 2EUR/user/month seems priced well.
|
| [1] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-
| details/... [2]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-
| global-d...
| arketyp wrote:
| I wonder how much is enterprise revenue albeit the sites
| are used as personal services.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| wait wtf why wont they just charge it then
|
| ffs
|
| i thought its 30 per month and thats why they dont do it,
| now i am even more upset for all the spying..
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| oh wait, thats 2.8b mau but most of them are worth
| nothing, look at west europe and north america, and only
| subset of them, its like 200 million people that have to
| pay >>> (89000000000/200000000) / 12
| 37.083333333333336
| tiluha wrote:
| Most people would not even pay a cent
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| i think the problem is that the people that will pay a
| cent are the people they are making 40$ per month from,
| and the rest of the MAUs are probably almost worthless
|
| so if they start charging, they will only lose
| kube-system wrote:
| I wonder how many users are unbanked and can't even pay a
| cent.
| ushakov wrote:
| they don't make nearly as much
| petters wrote:
| Why do you say that? The revenue of Facebook is public (86B
| in 2020). Is a lot of it not from users, or is the figure
| incorrect, or do they have many more users than they say
| they have?
| lopis wrote:
| I couldn't find it anywhere in their data statement, nor in their
| about page or terms and conditions, where the results were coming
| from. Finally at the bottom of the SERP there's the indication
| that results come from Microsoft (Bing). However, all links to
| Bing seem to happen in the backend, including linking to images.
| Would like to know how much data they share with Bing, but so far
| as it's visible from the client side it looks pretty solid. And
| they have podcast search, which is cute.
| poolie wrote:
| Hi. We list every source in our help-section:
| https://hilfe.nona.de/features/datenquellen
| dathinab wrote:
| Indexing the web and doing a initial evaluation is hard and
| costy.
|
| Because of this only a few search engines do so, if we exclude
| Asia the only starch engines I know which do so are Google,
| bing and Yandex(?).
|
| All other defer to one of thos search engines (most times bing)
| while decoupling, post and pre processing queries to a varying
| degree.
| RGamma wrote:
| This situation almost screams for web indexing as a service.
| Would love to see some search engine innovation, especially
| advanced curation, classification, archival and filtering(!)
| abilities.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| There is index of most sites to download at
| https://commoncrawl.org/
| allanrbo wrote:
| Brave say they have their own index actually, but also
| sometimes use other providers (maybe for when their own index
| didn't return enough results?). https://brave.com/brave-
| search-beta/
| munaf wrote:
| I love that people keep making alternatives, but I can't shake
| the feeling that whatever displaces search engines won't be
| recognizable as a search engine.
|
| (And I have no idea what it's going to be.)
| rp1 wrote:
| A search engine could replace a another search engine, but it'd
| need a better take than just being German. Google wasn't the
| first search engine after all.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| Seems to respect privacy. At least it only includes one external
| js resource, and doesn't leave cookies. And while the interface
| is in German, it does find results in various languages.
|
| Edit: I must add that I had my ad blocker on...
| poolie wrote:
| Yeah, we are using plausible.io as external analytics-service,
| without any cookies.
| keewee7 wrote:
| My ideal search engine would be 2008-2012 Google results but
| filtering out anything that even remotely smells of blog spam
| containing affiliate links.
| bserge wrote:
| So, Yandex. That's pretty much what it is today.
|
| Except it's Russian, so the propaganda conditioning kicks in.
| freediver wrote:
| Curious how much would you be prepared to pay per month for
| your ideal search engine?
| solarkraft wrote:
| For me (student) 5EUR/month is the no-brainer price for a
| useful service I use semi-daily. Beyond that it starts to
| hurt.
| 88840-8855 wrote:
| I would prefer a netflix model run by the gov. You pay 10
| Euro a month when having an internet connection. This is
| distributed based on your activity. Sites you use often are
| being paid more to run their infra. At the same time those
| sites are not allowed to run ads or affiliate crap. Also
| profits should be capped and taxed with 99% above a
| threshold. \
| achempion wrote:
| Do you know how to do ranking of that king without pinging
| anyone to setup your analytics tool and have previous history
| or searches?
| aeyes wrote:
| Did 2008-2012 Google have that? I think they mostly used
| backlink count.
| qwertox wrote:
| What is the relationship between Nona and Chronoto [0]?
|
| Chronoto sells luxury watches, is the same owner, registered at
| the same address and has the same commercial register entry.
|
| [0] https://www.chronoto.de/impressum/
|
| ---
|
| > (1) I agree that Nona Search Technologies GmbH ("Chronoto") may
| use my e-mail address for advertising Chronoto, including
| advertising in connection with the sale (e.g. information on the
| value of the watch and the sales process), the purchase (e.g.
| interesting offers of watches) and ownership (e.g. offers of
| insurance and financing, as well as maintenance and repair).
| poolie wrote:
| As it says in the imprint: Chronoto is a showcase for the
| search (and crawler) technology behind Nona, which we are going
| to offer next year.
|
| Chronoto doesn't sell watches, it's just a (meta-)search
| engine.
| qwertox wrote:
| So assuming I want to build a car search website where I get
| payed via referrals from let's say a predefined dozen of
| dealers, I could subscribe to this offering from Nona Search
| Technologies GmbH where it would crawl their sites and give
| me their new offerings in a predefined format?
| poolie wrote:
| For example, yeah! But you would still have to code the
| stuff around it. Like tracking referrals etc. :)
| neathack wrote:
| It says that Chronoto is a _search engine_ for luxury watches
| using Nona 's search tech.
| freediver wrote:
| Cool name, good design.. I also like the fact it has podcast
| search built in. Well done!
| stanislavb wrote:
| I dunno, there is something obviously wrong with this engine.
|
| When I search for "saashub", saashub.com isn't on the first page.
| And that's a website that's been online since 2014 and has more
| than one million page-views a month... -\\_(tsu)_/-.
| poolie wrote:
| It seems that saashub.com is not indexed by bing (the data-
| provider for webresults that nona uses) at all. You might want
| to register that domain at the Bing Webmaster Tools.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Compares well against Fireball, another German search engine that
| also has plenty of results for
| Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan
|
| https://fireball.de/search?q=Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellscha...
| vogre wrote:
| Russian Yandex is okay with it too
| https://yandex.ru/search/?lr=213&text=Donaudampfschiffahrtsg...
| timeon wrote:
| Looking at Ukraine's border... no thanks.
| hakanensari wrote:
| Googling this took me to the electrifyingly long Donaudampfschi
| ffahrtselektrizitatenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellscha
| ft.
|
| It seemingly won't even render properly here, at least on my
| iPhone.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan
|
| "Danube steamship company captain" per Google Translate, in
| case anyone else wonders what that beauty of a word-train means
| in English.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-11-18 23:01 UTC)