All the posts about Reddit blocking everyone except Google and Brave got me thinking: What if SearNGX was federated? I.E. when data is retrieved via a providers API, that data is then federated to all other instances.

It would spread the API load out amongst instances, removing the API bottlenecks that come from search providers.

It would allow for more anonymous search, since users could cycle between instances and get the same results.

Geographic bias would be a thing of the past.

Other than ActivityPub overhead and storage, which could be reduced by federating text-only content, I fail to see any downside.

Thoughts?

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[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I recall there is a federated search engine... somewhere. Anyone know what that was called.

[–] toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Are you thinking of YaCy?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Ah, I wondered if something like that had been tried before. Looks like it is maybe still running: https://yacy.net/

The demo isn't giving me useful search results.

[–] Wxnzxn@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.

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