PeARS-orchard VS mwmbl

> We now have a distributed crawler that runs on our volunteers' machines! If you have Firefox you can help out by installing our extension.

This is a very interesting idea that other search engines have tried before. Actually, the Brave search engine is built over Cliqz[6] that implemented this same idea but *without* the user's consent.

Copy pasting from an old comment I made about this "human web" crawler idea:

Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off.

PeARS was meant to be installed voluntarily by users who would then choose to share their indexes only to those they personally trusted, so the idea is very privacy conscious but also very hard to scale.

Cliqz, on the other hand, apparently tried to work around that issue by having their add-on bundled by default in some Firefox installations[5] which was obviously very controversial because of its privacy and user consent implications.

I still think the idea has potential, though, even if it's in a more limited scope.

[1] https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard

[2] https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-3...

[4] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

[5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_e...

echo "https://mwmbl.org/?q=$x"|client 185.34.32.175

Ironically I had to use a search engine to discover what "Mwmbl" was. It's apparently a search engine. But, visiting the front page, I see something akin to a git commit log?! I'm not sure I'd have guessed that this was a SE if Brave Search did not tell me it was (even then I'm not convinced yet).

https://mwmbl.org/

I believe this is closer to the thing you were asking about, and the simple answer appears to be "a home grown one in python" https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl/blob/e544d45c374c13cdc1a5048d...