GitHub - searxng/searxng: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
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SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. - searxng/searxng

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?

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
    4·
    2 months ago

    Sure. SearX is a meta-search engine. It does (only) queries to other search engines to get results. YaCy on the other hand is itself a search engine. It has the data available and doesn’t do queries to other engines. In theory you could combine the two concepts. Have a software that does both. But that requires some clever thinking. The returned (Google) ranking only applies to the exact search term. And it’s questionable if you can store it and do anything useful with it except for when some other user searches for the exact same thing. And also the returned teaser texts are very short and tailored to the search query. So maybe also useless. It’d be hard.

    One thing you could do is crawl the results that users actually click on. And I think YaCy already does that. AFAIK they had an browser add-on or a proxy or something to intercept visited pages (and hence search results).