No problem we crowdsource the crawling torrent style.

We outsourced that to google for reasonnable performance reason. But they shit the bed so now there’s no choice but to do it ourselves.

Surprisingly, it’s very doable, requires basic technical knowledge and relatively minimal computing resources (runs in the background on your computer).

https://yacy.net/ Github

I have tampermonkey script that sends yacy to crawl any websites that I visit, and it’s keeping up relatively good index for personal use of the visited websites. Combine yacy with ~300gb of Kiwix databases, add searxng as a frontend and you have pretty strong self hosted search engine.

Of course you need to supplement your searches from other search engines, as yacy does not crawl the whole web, just what you tell it to.

I encourage anyone who’s even slightly interested on this stuff to try Yacy, it’s ancient piece of software, but it still works very well and is not an abandoned project yet!

–

I personally use Yacy mostly on private mode, but it does have the distributed network there as well.

You could use Common Crawl, it’s run by a non profit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Crawl

Right!

Before his company was able to block more of Microsoft’s own tracking scripts, DuckDuckGo CEO and founder Gabriel Weinberg explained in a Reddit reply why firms like his weren’t going the full DIY route:

“… [W]e source most of our traditional links and images privately from Bing … Really only two companies (Google and Microsoft) have a high-quality global web link index (because I believe it costs upwards of a billion dollars a year to do), and so literally every other global search engine needs to bootstrap with one or both of them to provide a mainstream search product. The same is true for maps btw – only the biggest companies can similarly afford to put satellites up and send ground cars to take streetview pictures of every neighborhood.”

Ars

Federated bookmarks?

Google actually was good, so there’s probably some good information in this documentation. If nothing else we can perhaps figure out what “went wrong.”

Edit: I’ve been reading the blog post that appears to be the main person the leak was shared with and there’s a lot of in-depth analysis being done there, but I’m not seeing a link to the actual documents. This is a huge article, though, I might be overlooking it.

What it looks like beyond Google and Bing

It would be much harder to know what exists beyond “GBY” (Google, Bing, Yandex) and how it all works without the work of Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar. For three years, Kumar has been updating a heavily annotated list of search engines with their own indexes. It is 7,000 words, but only a portion of it deals with engines offering general indexing, in the English language. You can read Kumar’s evaluation methodology for a better understanding of how he compared and assessed sites.

What stands out? Mojeek (“it’s not bad… I’d live”) and Stract (“a useful supplement to more major engines”) are two of Kumar’s favorites. Right Dao has “very fast, good results,” in part because its crawler starts off from Wikipedia. Yep reaches farther out, showing results that link to and back from sites related to your query and also promises to share ad revenue with creators. All of them show promise, but you get the sense that they’re a second car, or a third bicycle, rather than a primary transport.

There are far smaller-scoped engines in other sections of Kumar’s post. If you’re wondering where that one other search engine you’ve heard about is, it’s probably in the “Semi-independent indexes” section, because it uses a GBY index when its own results are not strong enough. Here, you’ll find cryptocurrency-friendly, controversy-courting-founder-having Brave, a few engines that either “resell” GBY results or stuff affiliate links into them, and “the most interesting entry,” according to Kumar, Kagi.

Kagi requires an account and uses its own index, Teclis, in combination with Google, Bing, Yandex, Mojeek, and others, including, notably, Brave. Kagi’s founder has strong opinions on the AI-based future of search and responding to harmful searches in ways that are not “scalable.” How much of that does or does not bother you will vary, but it’s worth noting that Kagi also suffers when the GBY triumvirate is restricted.

Ars Technica this week: Bing outage shows just how little competition Google search really has

The referenced search engine comparison by Rohan “Seirdy” Kumar