this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2021
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Asklemmy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Has it been tried? it might require re-thinking how search engines work. If the databases were all formatted consistently, it seems possible.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Search engines are incredibly conplex. the problem might not be decentralization, but just proper investment and development.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 years ago

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 ;)

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

Interesting, couldn't you exclude results from servers that did this?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago (1 children)

My google and duckduckgo search results are also dominated by porn sites.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

well hey, I won't judge

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 years ago

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.