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This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time (www.404media.co)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (3 children)

What are the actual reasonable outcomes here:

The search engine becomes successful and requires monetization to pay for the hosting/indexing costs
The search engine does not become successful and the ever increasing cost of indexing the entire internet forces monetization or shut down
You self host your own version, in which case you need to start indexing yourself (see problem #2)

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think what would be interesting is to get everyone who self hosts this do part of the indexing. As in, find some way to split the indexing over self-hosted instances running this search engine. Then make sure "the internet" is divided somewhat reasonably. Kind of what crypto does, but instead producing the indexes instead of nothing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That would give random strangers (at least partial) control over what is indexed and how and you'd have to trust them all. I'm not sure that's a great idea.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

There areways to get around this. Give every indexing job to multiple nodes, decide the result by majority vote between those nodes and penalize (i.e. exclude) nodes that repeatedly produce results that don’t match the majority. Basically what distributed research has done for decades.

Getting the details of such a system right wouldn’t be easy but far from impossible.

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