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How hard is it really to have your own webcrawlers and index? (lemmy.world)
submitted 16 hours ago* by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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With the frustrations from using the usual search engines growing I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

It seems we've poisoned the well by allowing the proliferation of advertising interests to dominate the web.

Like how hard would it be to make your own non-commercial index?

Only human made sites that aren't related to buying, selling, marketing, etc.

Could that be a federated open-source project?

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[–] [S] 4 points 14 hours ago (7 children)

Thanks, nothing irritates me more than downvotes on a speculative statement.

I was thinking that having the index spread out amongst systems with their own crawlers would create some resiliency as well as spread out the hardware requirements.

But that might be me just misunderstanding the concept. Maybe something else works better.

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  • [–] 10 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    The internet is great for connecting machines. HTTP(s) could even be used to transfer messages. Blockchain is good for maintaining a historical record. The farther down the chain you go, the harder it becomes to rewrite history. You pay for this feature by requiring everyone to permanently keep the whole shared historical record. Some workarounds for the permanent storage of the whole history exist but that's blockchain in a basic form. The permanent record is a nice feature for things like financial transactions.

    Blockchain bros tried to convince us blockchain is great for sharing information in an effort to increase its relevance. You may connect it for that reason. In their defence, blockchain can be used for data transfer, it's just not that great at it.

    Blockchain could be used to assert trust, but most problems have equally good or better alternative solutions for that. Very often these use digital signatures and public-private keypairs.

    You may want to look at YaCy for a decentralised search engine.

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  • [–] 5 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

    I think you said "blockchain" when you really meant "distributed hash table."

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

    I shouldn't have said anything at all because now people much smarter than me are going down a rabbit hole instead the main gist I was trying to convey. 😵‍💫

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago

    Yes, you should have commented what you did, because [eventually] someone gave you an explanation of why what you thought isn't as good as you thought it was. Also... Why be "smart" and "interesting" when you can be a collection of 300 tangential rabbit hole topics in a trench coat?

    Me though? I chose to be a library of sick references in a hunched human form.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    Storing the index on the blockchain itself isn't really feasible, but I think you could leverage it as a source of truth for what distributed stores (e.g. torrent, WebDAV, ftp, s3) contain the correct and latest info.

    Tough part is verification. You need a consensus for what is accurate before you add it to the chain. If someone indexes 1000 sites and someone else goes to verify it the sites could've changed in that time. Doesn't mean the proposed data is wrong but how do you separate outdated info from bad info (i.e. data poisoning)?

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