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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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SearNGX should be a federated search engine (github.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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All the posts about Reddit blocking everyone except Google and Brave got me thinking: What if SearNGX was federated? I.E. when data is retrieved via a providers API, that data is then federated to all other instances.

It would spread the API load out amongst instances, removing the API bottlenecks that come from search providers.

It would allow for more anonymous search, since users could cycle between instances and get the same results.

Geographic bias would be a thing of the past.

Other than ActivityPub overhead and storage, which could be reduced by federating text-only content, I fail to see any downside.

Thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Okay, sorry! Still a long way to go before the idea becomes sufficiently well-specified to make much sense to me though. Perhaps an examination of yacy could provide you a concrete example of the ways in which such things are complicated. One would need to do much better to end up with a suitable replacement for the ways many of us use searx.

It was wanting to use ActivityPub and the "I fail to see any downside" which led me to read the rest of your post in a way that might've been overly pessimistic about its merits.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yea, another user has suggested passing along the request to other instances when API limits are hit. That sounds like a better model for SearXNG specifically.