Agreed. The article also made me think a little too... I mean there must be some seriously... Um, dedicated, people out there working on this stuff, and somehow it trundles along, and the end result is pretty damn good. Life I guess.
Have you never noticed that all the really good sites you 'find' have been because someone posted the link? For example in a comment on HN, or reddit. Or a related link on Wikipedia or the sidebar of a subreddit?
I agree! I'd never thought of using tor, but I had very similar ideas about an engine that doesn't index a site if it has ads, etc.
I had an idea of using a delayed response in order to lessen the hardware requirements. So a user submits a query, then checks back later for a response. A little bit like a traditional library, haha!
Anyway, i'm really glad to hear others are doing similar stuff, I think there is a market. The info is out there, it's just lost in a sea of noise.
I like Firefox too, but chrome still displays JSON objects in the console very nicely. I haven't found a good way to do this in FF yet. Do you know of a way?
Can you clarify what you mean by submissions from independent blogs? You seem to be saying that the new users are bots or something from media/marketing ? Or am i reading too much iwmto this...