PeARS-orchard VS Yacy

> 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...

It turns out you can make it all the way to become president of Harvard [1] while ignoring this rule so it is questionable whether it is as set in stone as you make it out to be, at least in certain disciplines.

In a way these models are a perfect mirror of the current academic climate. They plagiarise without remorse, they follow the latest identity-politics diktat to a point and make up 'facts' when needed to reach a desired narrative. Google Gemini is the latest example [2] of where this leads.

Given that it is plausible that models like these will soon be used in educational settings this is a recipe for disaster. The same goes for the trend to replace search engine results with 'interpreted' results in which LLMs take up the same role as Winston in 1984: Winston works in the Ministry of Truth where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party.

It is time for a decentralised distributed search engine which limits itself to pure search, something like YaCy [3]. Something to replace Winstonian search engines like Google and Bing (et al.).

[1] https://www.campusreform.org/article/claudine-gay-is-a-dei-h...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39465255

[3] https://yacy.net/

> Now I just need some kind of open source search engine to run on it ...

Here you go: https://yacy.net

I remember https://yacy.net/ but the big problem of this project was java and had not implementations in others languages. I mean it as imagine torrent was only in perl.

Admarus is similar as Yacy but aims to be distributed where Yacy is federated. Both are made for the web

You should check out https://yacy.net: a global, P2P web search engine, where each peer can build and share its own index, etc.

I also have an instance of Yacy installed, which I use to index the entire system, giving me my own private, internal search engine.