A tool for searching rationalist & EA webs

Sep 29 20231 min read 8

11

Building effective altruismEffective Altruism ForumLessWrong

This is a linkpost for https://ratsearch.blogspot.com/

UPDATE (November 24) - If you have ChatGPT plus, you can try the GPT-bot version. This bot primarily searches through EA webs, if it fails to find anything relevant, it broadens the search to the whole web (more information here).
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I've made a simple website where you can limit your Google search to webs related to EA and rationalism. There are three modes:

Basic webs (EA Forum, LessWrong, Alignment Forum, 80.000 Hours, ACX, SSC)
Search by topics (webs, which Google thinks are related with topics like Effective Altruism)
Search webs + blogs ~~(basic webs, blogs listed~~ ~~here~~ ~~and~~ ~~here, webs of EA-adjacent orgs listed~~ ~~here~~) (webs listed at ea.news)

Note that the first few results tend to be ads.

I've made the web with near-zero programming experience using Google's Programmable Search Engine app and ParseHub for webscraping links. You can access the full list of webs here.

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PabloOct 1 20238

Effective Altruism News also offers this: just click ‘Run this search externally’ after typing your search query. We currently index ~350 sites.

Martin (Huge) VlachOct 31 20232

Fixed, thanks @Daniel_Friedrich!
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If it is anyhow possible for the results( from the second and third tab/option) to have a backling to the main page, I would feel some comfort from that, esp. when sharing a results list.

DAOMaximalistOct 1 20232

Great resource. Would be quite helpful to me.

If you don't mind I will like to suggest that you could maybe create a post on the site describing what the tool is and how to use it.

Right now, it shows "There's nothing here!" below the links. If you make a post I think it will show up there on the front page instead of "There's nothing here!".

It will also give some context to people who stumble on the site without any previous knowledge of it, and will help in your SEO too (to get organic visitor traffic from Google search).

Well done, nonetheless. Thanks for the effort and time put in and thanks for sharing.

Daniel_FriedrichOct 1 20231

Thanks, I've changed it up

Martin (Huge) VlachNov 3 20231

Any idea why chatGPT is included among the sources/results?
see https://ibb.co/XyWL01P
or perhaps try yourself: https://ratsearch.blogspot.com/p/search-blogs.html#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=cap%20table&gsc.sort=

Daniel_FriedrichNov 3 20232

Yes, OpenAI's domain name is in the list because they have a blog

Martin (Huge) VlachNov 3 20231

That makes sense, but https://chat.openai.com/ and https://openai.com/blog seems like a different (sub)domain and still weird the first one appears in results.-|

Daniel_FriedrichNov 3 20231

My intention was to make any content published by OpenAI accessible