As conversations continue circulating around the state of online privacy and protecting personal information on the internet, the growing need for more secure web platforms is an area of concern for consumers and creators alike in the digital age.
These three reasons show why search is ripe for disruption -- and rich with opportunity. "Million Short, a customizable search engine, believes, however, that filter bubbles can be popped if people are given more options and control over how they search for information online."
The Million Short search engine offers you the option to eliminate up to the first one million sites in its results — thereby stripping sponsored sites and ads, junk and content optimized for search engines. You can further drill down results by country and remove sites with ads, live chat and e-commerce.
Hosts Rahul Kapoor and David Rovertson disucss Million Short with Founder and CEO, Sanjay Arora
"Millionshort.com elides the top 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or one million results of your search, providing more direct connection to less popular chatter."
"It’s a refreshing change to see a website like Million Short to come around. When a user searches anything, the website literally removes the first million websites (not the first million search items: it ends up being far more than a million). What results is a plethora of often high-value search results that aren’t driven by Google or SEO-related algorithms."
"At this point it's ludicrous to think of using any other search engine than Google. But while it's very effective, you'll find your search results coming from many of the web's top sites again and again. What if you wanted to find something a little more eclectic? Well, a new search engine called Million Short offers just that by letting you ignore the top million websites on the internet."
"Million Short is an experimental search engine that returns more eclectic search results by removing the top million most popular websites from its search. It can also be configured to ignore the top 100, 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 websites."
Million Short was featured in a segment of BBC programme, Click.
"Imagine an online search for Facebook that omits all the results from Facebook.com. And from other major websites like Wikipedia, and instead the first few results it delivers are from sites offering free graphics for users' profile pages, a security and privacy guide, precautions for parents, or a collection of funny statuses."
"MillionShort first appeared in May as a “Show HN” demo on Y Combinator’s news aggregator and discussion site Hacker News, where it quickly amassed hundreds of comments within the first day it was posted."
"People look for diverse forms of information whether it's a mainstream alternative like Bing or an alternative like Million Short, one can understand that there's real interest."
"Think of Million Short is not so much a search engine, but a discovery engine. Million Short's strength is not going to be answering the specific kind of queries that Google is forever optimizing its index to handle, but to discover less well-known sites and explore the more remote corners of the web that might be lost in other search indexes."
The idea is pretty powerful.
"Tired of all your search results coming from the same few sites? The tinkerers at Exponential Labs have you covered. Despite its almost unimaginable scope, the Internet can sometimes seem like a pretty small place these days. For some common types of search queries, top results tend to come from a relatively limited pool of websites -- the LinkedIns, Wikipedias and Amazons of the world."
"How do you sort and rank the very best information? What if the information returned by two sites -- Google Places and Yelp, for example -- is nearly identical? Those decisions are judgment calls, coded into Google's algorithm by humans."
The search engine giant’s infamous algorithm has therefore become a monopolising, highly sought-after secret SEO that specialists around the world are trying to crack. But what about the value in the rest of the information on the internet? Million Short, a new search engine developed by Exponential Labs, is hoping to provide an alternative.
"In this age of media conglomerates and search engine optimization, it can be hard to dig through for information from less well-placed sources. Million Short aims to fix that problem by removing a user-specified amount of top results from your searches in order to highlight sites you may not have seen before."
"Within a week of going live the site had logged 1 million visitors, and a month later Arora says it already ranks among the top 10,000 most-trafficked sites in the U.S."
"The search results were a little surprising. No Facebook, Google+, or other accounts that Google typically returns on searches for my name. These are the results that are typically buried on the deepest pages of search engines like Google and Bing."
"Do you ever feel the search results that Google yields are too mainstream? Are you looking to explore the cavernous, cobweb-laden outer reaches of the interwebs? If you want to spend some time on some deep discovery, Million Short might be your ticket."
"Don't limit your discovery to one engine. You can find some jewels if you look somewhere else, and that includes directories."