In today’s news at 33:25 they are talking about black and white lists in google search and what a good idea it would be.
WELL! About a year and a half ago a lunatic friend of mine asked if I could make him his own google that only returned results from a white lists of websites that he would add to over time to build a ‘reliable’ source for news etc.
I had no idea how to do it but (this was 6 months before I got access to chatGPT) I got to googling how I might be able to set this up and it turns out google have it built in to their functions for developers.
So, using their own tools which are meant to let people use their search engine to search their own website, I created a website that has a white list of about 70 websites and looks and feels much like google.
I will have to go back and remember exaclty how I have set it all up, but for now if anyone wants to give it a try you can find it at https://truthcrawler.com/
It is just an embedded google search bar with a wall paper, but it works well.
The white list for this search is specific to my friends politics and views, so I imagine there is some inflammatory stuff somewhere in there, user beware!
I watched the same episode and hearing Wendell and the guys talking about the declining quality of google searches made me wonder if I should be switching.
It can be really hard to find what I am searching for sometimes.
I just like googles simplicity. It’s just a blank page with a search bar and I really like that.
Just a quick follow up for anyone wanting to make their own custom search engine. It really is VERY easy. Bare in mind it doesn’t break the chains to google, just enhances your experience.
Anyway. To get things started you need a very basic web page. Onto that yoiu create your search box by going HERE
Then once you have made your box just copy the code into your web page and away you go.
It is really striaght forward but if anyone gets stuck I can do a in depth guide. Just let me know.
If you make a publically hosted one like Truth Crawler post it back here or on the forum somewhere. There are proably a lot of people out there wishing they had a better way to google!
Makes me wonder what the self-hosted search engines are doing (search github for awesome-self-hosted, not allowed to link to it yet). Especially whoogle.
People also use Algolia for custom search. Though, this is more so for indexing your own site, not an entire search engine for content elsewhere on the internet.