Re:DuckDuckGo vs Google
by boramalper on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @11:54AM
(#15295162)
> Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine.
Not sure if federated by they call themselves decentralised: https://yacy.net/en/index.html
Who would host the index? You can't contact one million peers to run a search, so fanout-on-read doesn't work. If the index is also distributed (by search term?), then the search+indexing nodes will need to fanout-on-write, which is less latency-sensitive but still pretty onerous.
Re:DuckDuckGo vs Google
by tastythrowaway on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @11:30AM
(#15294851)
This is a brilliant idea. Let's work on that. Seriously. Do you want to work on this together?
In the same vein, what good is an index of the web going to be? Googles value isn't their index, its how they translate your search terms into good results from that index. Anyone can index the web, not everyone can make sense of it from human questions.
Instead, I am wondering why there isnt a federated open source search engine. It would be a cloud of nodes, each node spidering and indexing a small hash bucket of urls. With a million such nodes we could have a live updated, distributed search engine to replace Google. We could run millions of queries without paying someone - we'd pay back by serving as a node, just like in BitTorrent. With all the interest in privacy, I wanted to see more discussion of replacing Google with an open, non-censured and private protocol for search.