Apparently, many (predominantly young) people use TikTok as a search engine. Personally, I don’t use social media so I don’t see the appeal to this, but recently I started to use YCombinator’s Hacker News as a search engine.

I think this may be a small trend (even though I don’t any data to prove it): people are looking for more (human-)filtered search engines. I think people are sick of the very commercial and “ad-promoting” results of Google.

I don’t use Google because of privacy concerns, but I also think Google and most other search engines are not good at finding interesting stuff on the internet. Sure, they’re good at finding useful information, but I can’t find interesting stuff. Most results on popular search engines are popular sites like Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia and other news sites and almost all other results are blogs littered with ads that are most likely automatically generated or written by very low paid indians.

Almost all the interesting things I read on the internet nowadays come from HN; it’s really a breath of fresh air. It’s the last place on the “big internet” where you can still find REAL people. Almost all other social media platforms encourage you to make your digital home on their platform, and this is why they seem so unpersonal; every account has an identical page. The only thing differentiating you from another person is your silly profile picture and username.

On HN, you create an account with the purpose of sharing the interesting things you found or created with the world. HN doesn’t become your digital home, it’s a link aggregator with a ranking and comment system.

People on the internet with similar ideas

I wondered if there we’re other people that shared my idea, so I searched on HN some keywords that might result in interesting results and found this article, that proposed the creation of a search engine that used the popular posts on HN.

Thesis: Sites that do well on hacker news will tend to be sites with high quality content.

I don’t really think it’s worth going through all this effort to achieve something you can already sort of achieve by using HN’s search function. My theory is that people already post all the interesting content on HN, so there’s no need to index it yourself.

Interesting findings

While searching for other unusual search engines I found MoodSurf ^{[1] [2]}, while not exactly a search engines, allows you to find interesting threads on twitter and WolframAlpha, wich is a special kind of search engine, that gives you very specific results (graphs, tables, maps) for science- and statistics-oriented questions.