Is it just me or are many independent search engines down? Duckduckgo, my go to engine, qwant, ecosia, startpage… All down? The only hint I got was on the qwant page…
Edit: it all seems to be related to bing being down. I hope the independent engines will find a way to get really independent…
I was thinking about this and imagined the federated servers handling the index db, search algorithms, and search requests, but instead leverage each users browser/compute to do the actual web crawling/scraping/indexing; the server simply performing CRUD operations on the processed data from clients to index db. This approach would target the core reason why search engines fail (cost of scraping and processing billions of sites), reduce the costs to host a search server, and spread the expense across the user base.
It also may have the added benefit of hindering surveillance capitalism due to a sea of junk queries from every client, especially if it were making crawler requests from the same browser (obviously needs to be isolated from the users own data, extensions, queries, etc). The federated servers would also probably need to operate as lighthouses that orchestrate the domains and IP ranges to crawl, and efficiently distribute the workload to client machines.
Shit man thats exactly the kind of implementation i was thinking about. Had the idea for a couple years now but now that the fediverse is starting to gain traction i think it’s probably about time some code gets written. Unfortunatly due to CORS u cant just start serving people a js script that starts indexing in the background.
The theory with crawling is it has discovery built into it, no? You follow outbound links and discover domains that way. So you need some seeds, but otherwise you discover based on what other people already know about.
To me the problem seems like a few submarines in a cave. They can each see a little bit of what’s around them, and then they can share maps. Like the minimum knowledge of the internet is one’s own explorations. As one browses the web, their sensors are storing everything they see. It also actively searches with other agents, automatically crawls on its own like active sensors on a submarine always mapping out the environment.
Then, in the presence of other friendly subs, you can trade information. So one’s own personal and small map of the internet can get merged and mixed with others to get a more and more complete version.
Obviously this can be automated and batched, but that’s sort of the analogy I see in the real world: multiple parties exploring an unknown/changing space and sharing their data to make a map.