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?

  • fmstratOPAEnglish
    3•1 month ago

    Well, I am, including products in the Fediverse. And I never said federate the search queries.

    Trying to build an index of the web by querying other search engines is not an efficient or sensible way to do things.

    Never made this suggestion.

    On the other hand a distributed web crawler that puts its results in a free and decentralized database

    Now you’re getting there.

    • kbal
      3•1 month ago

      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.

      • fmstratOPAEnglish
        4•1 month 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.