I'm intrigued by this experiment but I can't visualize it. What do you mean by boring results? Would combing through a library (the one with paper books) also produce boring results? What's your ideal results?
Perhaps a counter example, something that is interesting. Anecdotally. This, of all things, is the top result in my search: https://tft.brainiac.com/archive/0303/msg00037.html. Which is strange to me because I don't recognize tft.brainiac. I click, it's a list of biological relationships among Hymenoptera, including a reference to genus of the wasps I studied, presumably in a biological relationship (host/parasite) context. I cataloged every relationship known at one point, so my brain wants to know where this come from, is it something I caught. Then I go look for more context, and find it's part of a thread about D&D(?) and hymenoptera, and it's epic, and a chunk of my morning is lost figuring out why and how this came to be.
If I understand it correctly, you're interested in bits and pieces of new information that's indirectly related to your object of interest. Degree 2 and 3 in Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, so to speak. You know degree 0 like the back of your hand and you've seen almost everything closely connected. Finding novel, interesting things is getting more difficult.
Have you thought about cataloging all the related stuff you stumble upon? Something in between loose notes and what Moby Dick is to cetology.
> Have you thought about cataloging all the related stuff you stumble upon? Something in between loose notes and what Moby Dick is to cetology.
Tongue in cheek- new app time, to facilitate this. It should have the name "Degree4". Entries can only be made if degrees 2 and 3 are "defined". Scoffs at degrees 5 and 6, just because. Startup developing can probably unethically seed content by mining https://www.everything2.com/. Should use concepts of "AI" and "persistent homology"... profit!
But no, I don't outside a mental note. Closest I would come would be adding '!! <some note>' to my potwiki text notes (see my past comments) if its something I want to have come back with a grep, or think might be interesting to explore "when I retire". If it's a scientific fact in my field after researching it further it would go into this https://taxonworks.org (or its precursor).
In part, by boring results I mean I instantly recognize the top results, and I know exactly what will be in them, and I know which ones will actually contain potentially interesting new stuff, i.e. _I didn't have to search for these, I'd go their directly_. Then next results are all obscure, and I've already visited them, and/or I know they are historical and not something I have to revisit.
With this engine with at least 1/2 the links (to be fair there were < 20) I didn't recognize the URL at all, and it was clear in the text or the URL that there was an interesting bit to check out (i.e. what Google should have also returned after they barfed out the things I don't need to know about), but had never succinctly done in my experience.
I suppose the magic in this engine would have to be alerting the searcher that they found more of this type of link, as once I visited the 10 or so sites they would fall back into the "been there, done that" link category that Google appends somewhere after the ads and "big" sites, mixed in with a million search term spam sites, etc.
There are decades of academic research not digitized. The digitization window used to only hit around 1990, I haven't looked at it hard recently, but I suspect this still remains true for many important journals. This is grey only to those who do not know how to use a library.
