this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2021
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Search engines. It just doesn't work.
SearX is decentralized meta-search engine
YaCy is decentralized true search engine (i think)
Yeah that's an accurate way of putting it.
Has it been tried? it might require re-thinking how search engines work. If the databases were all formatted consistently, it seems possible.
There's Yacy. It worked ok when I was running it locally, but the moment I connected it to the rest of the network my search results were dominated by porn and spam sites.
Search engines are incredibly conplex. the problem might not be decentralization, but just proper investment and development.
I agree. I think it's sad that YaCy never worked as well as the alternatives, but it is a very cool project nonetheless!
Maybe in the future someone will try the concept again and succeed.
Also: Google is getting worse and worse, so it'll get easier over time ;)
the problem as I understand it is that with yacy you request relevant results from peers in addition to your own local DB. but that makes it really easy for spammers to keyword-stuff results and push their sites to the top.
I'm not sure how we can trust random people to give you search results without being overrun by spam.
Interesting, couldn't you exclude results from servers that did this?
My google and duckduckgo search results are also dominated by porn sites.
well hey, I won't judge
Yes, there is YaCy. And it sucks. It brings like 10 results in single word searches, usually none of which are relevant. When you write a sentence of sorts it just freezes.
Backend is implied here (quasi-decentralised frontends can be great), and agreed itβs incredibly valuable to have a central index of content, rankings, answers. Maybe it can be overcome by advances in data transfer speeds and some talent taking interest in the project (for example, would centralised search be used on Mars?)