Happy Friday! I built Doc Search with the generous help and advice of my wife. During a long car ride, we got to talking about the increasing difficulty of finding in-depth information on many topics using consumer-focused search engines. She lamented the disappearance of the option to show only PDFs in the search results as well as the shift toward "helpfully" ignoring some of the terms or directives she would try to add to a query to refine it.
I think I understand (at least some of) the constraints and incentives that push consumer search engines to work the way they do and I suspect the current state of the art strikes a good balance in accommodating them. After all, there are a lot of really smart people working on the problem.
By scoping the problem differently, I suspect that smaller operators can build tools shaped by different constraints and incentives and provide better service to their respective niches. Doc Search is my contribution to this effort. We've been using it for the past eighteen months or so as I've worked to grow the index. It's getting to the point where it usually gets us useful results, so I thought it would be a good time to share it and solicit broader feedback.
I hope you find it useful! Please let me know what you think. I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have.
Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.
In the United States, engineering drawings or reports submitted to local, state, or federal government agencies typically have to be stamped by a licensed professional engineer. You'll sometimes see similar requirements in private industry as well.
Around here (and maybe in all of the United States?) you don't have to be a PE to call yourself an engineer, but I think in some countries you do. I personally reserve the expression "real engineer" for PE's who can stamp drawings and have the license and insurance to back it up.
But, hey. What do I know? I'm probably overpaying by going to a "real" dentist.
For sure. I stood in line for the original iPhone, owned every model (except the 5C) up through the 6, then an SE, X, and now an 11 Pro since it came out. I played around with Siri when it debuted, but didn't use it much. I turned it off at some point (I think it was when Apple was catching grief for keeping recordings or something like that) and haven't missed it. I'm not against it especially -- it just never really became part of my life.
My colleagues and I had a moment of fun somewhere in remote Iceland, offroading on the way to a glacier. On an iPhone 3G, we were able to ask trivia questions and get pretty useful responses.
Aside from setting a timer, I've not seen Siri do anything more useful in 9 years. You haven't missed anything.
"Get lucky" is solid advice, but you've also got to give luck something to work with. I think your overnight success started a long time ago, at least as far back as when you showed your manager you weren't a bozo.
Of course but there's no insight there. It's just, be smart, study and learn a lot, maintain a decent appearance, work hard on useful or interesting things, kep stretching and growing to new things, make friends, keep in touch, ask to get paid for you work. Completely normal "middle class / entrepreneur values" type stuff.
Thank you for your kind words! For lofi.limo I support back to Chrome 49 and Firefox 52 (the last versions available for Windows XP), which I /think/ both have Fetch, so I could have probably used it here.
Fetch has about the same capabilities as XHR, so it should be a drop-in replacement in this project. Let's call it an exercise for the reader! ;)
If every developer just did what you advise and no more, I would consider it a big win. I saw at a previous employer exactly how much extra work and complexity we had to build into our operations just to deal with clients using dumb simple retry loops.
You're right. HTML5 does not work with DTDs anymore, so unclosed tags are not a violation of the document schema and therefore probably not "punishable" by search engines.
Oh, wow... I hadn't even thought of the diff angle, but it makes all the sense in the world. I've heard some authors even start each clause on its own line. I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.
> The right way to tie your shoes is with a square knot. It's easy to confuse this with the granny knot, which is the wrong way. The square knot is a simple and sound knot with many uses. The granny knot is an unsound knot whose only known uses are to make your shoelaces look crooked and to trip you.
I think I understand (at least some of) the constraints and incentives that push consumer search engines to work the way they do and I suspect the current state of the art strikes a good balance in accommodating them. After all, there are a lot of really smart people working on the problem.
By scoping the problem differently, I suspect that smaller operators can build tools shaped by different constraints and incentives and provide better service to their respective niches. Doc Search is my contribution to this effort. We've been using it for the past eighteen months or so as I've worked to grow the index. It's getting to the point where it usually gets us useful results, so I thought it would be a good time to share it and solicit broader feedback.
I hope you find it useful! Please let me know what you think. I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have.