Show HN: A recommendation system to explore the non-commercial web
browserbuddy.comHey HN, thank you for being a part of the internet we love. We’re Arnav, Mo, Jeremy and we’re building an “Internet For-You page” that recommends blogs and essays based on your interests. Try it here [https://www.browserbuddy.com/]! Here’s a video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj1bdfJwV0c
We love to discover and learn from personal blogs, essays, and articles on the internet. But despite exciting advancements in language modeling, it’s felt harder to discover interesting links from real people.
We believe there is untapped potential to use these language models as “curators” rather than “creators”. To explore this, we’re building a recommendation system that curates content for you based on the links you visit from our site. You can also prompt it with things like “serendipity in art” or “I want to learn more about the intersection of painting and programming”.
Under the hood, we’ve trained a decoder model (llama) to understand how people recommend sites through hyperlinks and used it to embed ~40 million sites. These embeddings are served in a custom database we’re building to run fast on commodity hardware, work well with both vector and structured data, and serve more expressive representations of the sites (multi-vector, multimodal, etc).
We’ve had a blast using it internally, and early users have mentioned it reminds them of Stumbleupon.
We still have a long way to go and would love to hear your feedback! There are no sign-up barriers to get started. Pretty fun, but how can you tell the content you link to is from "real people"? How is the feed ordered, I saw a pretty wide timerange? Is it supposed to be used as a search engine, feed, or more like "stumble!"? It's a bit opaque right now, but we rank up content from authors we know are real people that write online...working to make this clearer in the interface. The feed is ordered primarily by the what you've specified as interests and the salience of authors. As we find new essays that score high "relevance" when compared to the topics you've selected, your feed will be updated with more recent content. In our personal use, we use it as a hybrid between feed of our favorite topics and exploring (stumbling upon) new things. The "prompt your feed" aspect definitely adds some search engine-like capabilities, while still letting you surf through the things you don't know about. Thank you for expanding on it! There is also https://wiby.me search engine.