this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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How do you build a federated search index?
Also why? Searxng is a thing. I would argue search wouldn't need to be federated. Makes sense for social media, web is already connected.
Isn't searxng just a proxy for google and bing? Not sure how that "increases diversity" or "adds competition" or "improves search results"...
It can proxy anything you want to. There are a lot of searxng instances out there who have different setups. You could proxy only google or all the search engines that exist. Up to you. Ideally, I would make it so searxng can operate independently and have their own search engine algorithm but so far, this is the most open source and self hostable option available.
That's great an all, but it doesn't change the market one bit. Nearly all "alternative" search engines are bing proxies already. When bing went down a month or so ago, many of those "alternatives" went down too. Even the ones that supposedly had their own indices. I know this because I was using an alternative that simply went down too.
Searxng just serves as a proxy in front of a proxy.
In fact it improves search results, when you have multiple search engines turned on searxng does some sorting or filtering thing and manages to filter out lots SEO crap and ads from search.
fr, searxng is the b0ss
There's YaCy, it's just not good
Had a look: it's 20 years and maintained by one single dude. Do you think one dude could compete with google? He needs help, and a lot of it.
I was just pointing out that it is in fact possible, and has been done
I don't know how. How do torrents work?
Can it be AI powered with cryptocurrency backend?
Torrent is file sharing. Apples an oranges.
No, I mean the tech behind it, not the concept. The bittorrent application is able to find a file to download from a bunch of other people. Not only the file itself, but parts of it. It's a distributed search.
torrents have trackers, special servers that keep track of who's got which parts of a file.
DHT
This works because it's the same file just distributed. But in the case of search, every node would need to have the entire index of the web. If not, how would the client decide who's index is better and which page rank fits better with the search? I really don't see how this would work.