Recently I’m interested in decentralized technologies such as Kbin from Reddit. And I wonder what about search engine.
Is there any ones, and how about them actually? (for example YaCy P2P search engine I’ve heard but not try yet)
Yacy has been there for a long time, before the concept of fediverse, and before our increased concerns about privacy.
Such a nice project, but too bad it never gathered a strong userbase.
How would a decentralized search engine work? What aspect is decentralized? I’m curious how that’d work
If I read it correctly, YaCy is like using a torrent except the information being shared between peers is search information. When you do a search you’re essentially asking everyone else in the swarm for access to their YaCy search cache. The bigger the swarm the more data is available. It seems you can also initiate your own webcrawling to increase the size of the cache you share. So the searches are completely decentralized and unmodified by any profit-motivated algorithms and come directly from other users searches/crawling. It also seems impossible to be tracked this way. You could see that your IP was connected to the swarm, but it doesn’t seem possible to know what it’s doing on the swarm because there is no central server to log it, just a bunch of direct connections between computers in the swarm.
I don’t know correctly, for example YaCy site describes that.
This one is a Metasearch engine but Searxng which can be self-hosted
presearch.io is decentralized, but I don’t use it very often, so it may be a bad recommendation.
Bleh, presearch is tied to crypto nonsense. I think something like YaCy is a more viable project. I can’t say if one is better than the other functionally, but I feel like anyone trying to get away from Google is doing it because of the excessive monetization messing with their searches, to then switch to something built to prop up a token/coin seems a bit strange imo.
Presearch and PRE are related, but you can use the search engine without any interaction with PRE.
Presearch has been my default search engine for over a year. It is a functional replacement for Google, but not without its quirks. Image searches are vastly better on Google in my experience. And I still search frequently on Google Maps for data that is heavily influenced by location.
Thank you, seems to be interesting
