• Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I was about to jump off DuckDuckGo as its also going down, was going to go for kagi, in very much reconsidering that now… But then what?

    Running your own personal search engine might be a bit much to chew off for most people, but is there a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to, perhaps?

    Edit: and before anyone ironically says “Google that yourself”, I already searched and found a lot of blog posts, GitHub projects, but nothing concrete, no “that’s the one!” Project that is and open source and federated…

    • self@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      a good open source federated search engine out there that I can contribute a server to

      I’d love to contribute to something like this. it might even make for a good replacement for lemmy’s awful built-in search

        • self@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          7 months ago

          you’re right

          the other poster was most likely trying to stir up shit given we’re on a federated network (see also their other post), but I have been obsessed with the idea of a federated search engine this weekend

          it’s definitely a worthwhile idea, but anything that does federated indexing will have to deal with moderation and abuse prevention first. those are hard problems in ordinary federated networks, but search engines specifically are targets of hostile SEO and spam in ways that few other systems are. those aren’t insurmountable problems though — just ones that need to be solved before federation is practical.

          • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            7 months ago

            I dunno. Google is currently overwhelmed by SEO optimized crap (at least I guess so, I stopped using it years ago because of that) and I think a federated system where members have different prioritizations would make SEO optimization very very hard to abuse.

            • self@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              7 months ago

              I hope so! this is something I’d like to implement, once I’ve got some free deployment resources and time.